29
BLACK POWER
Negroes can still march down the path of nonviolence and interracial amity if white America will meet them with honest determination to rid society of its inequality and inhumanity.
“James Meredith has been shot!”
It was about three o’clock in the afternoon on a Monday in June 1966, and I was presiding over the regular staff meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in our Atlanta headquarters. When we heard that Meredith had been shot in the back only a day after he had begun his Freedom March through Mississippi, there was a momentary hush of anger and dismay throughout the room. Our horror was compounded by the fact that the early reports announced that Meredith was dead. Soon the silence was broken, and from every corner of the room came expressions of outrage. The business of the meeting was forgotten in the shock of this latest evidence that a Negro’s life is still worthless in many parts of his own country.
When order was finally restored, our executive staff immediately agreed that the march must continue. After all, we reasoned, Meredith began his lonely journey as a pilgrimage against fear. Wouldn’t failure to continue only intensify the fears of the oppressed and deprived Negroes of Mississippi? Would this not be a setback for the whole civil rights movement and a blow to nonviolent discipline?
After several calls between Atlanta and Memphis, we learned that the earlier reports of Meredith’s death were false and that he would recover. This news brought relief, but it did not alter our feeling that the civil rights movement had a moral obligation to continue along the path that Meredith had begun.
The next morning I was off to Memphis along with several members of my staff. Floyd McKissick, national director of CORE, flew in from New York and joined us on the flight from Atlanta to Memphis. After landing we went directly to the Municipal Hospital to visit Meredith. We were happy to find him resting well. After expressing our sympathy and gratitude for his courageous witness, Floyd and I shared our conviction with him that the march should continue in order to demonstrate to the nation and the world that Negroes would never again be intimidated by the terror of extremist white violence. Realizing that Meredith was often a loner and that he probably wanted to continue the march without a large group, we felt that it would take a great deal of persuasion to convince him that the issue involved the whole civil rights movement. Fortunately, he soon saw this and agreed that we should continue without him. We spent some time discussing the character and logistics of the march, and agreed that we would consult with him daily on every decision.
As we prepared to leave, the nurse came to the door and said, “Mr. Meredith, there is Mr. Carmichael in the lobby who would like to see you and Dr. King. Should I give him permission to come in?” Meredith consented. Stokely Carmichael entered with his associate, Cleveland Sellers, and immediately reached out for Meredith’s hand. He expressed his concern and admiration and brought messages of sympathy from his colleagues in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. After a brief conversation we all agreed that James should get some rest and that we should not burden him with any additional talk. We left the room assuring him that we would conduct the march in his spirit and would seek as never before to expose the ugly racism that pervaded Mississippi and to arouse a new sense of dignity and manhood in every Negro who inhabited the bastion of man’s inhumanity to man.
In a brief conference Floyd, Stokely and I agreed that the march would be jointly sponsored by CORE, SNCC, and SCLC, with the understanding that all other civil rights organizations would be invited to join. It was also agreed that we would issue a national call for support and participation.
One hour later, after making staff assignments and setting up headquarters at the Rev. James Lawson’s church in Memphis, a group of us packed into four automobiles and made our way to that desolate spot on Highway 51 where James Meredith had been shot the day before. So began the second stage of the Meredith Mississippi Freedom March.
“Disappointment produces despair and despair produces bitterness”
As we walked down the meandering highway in the sweltering heat, there was much talk and many questions were raised.
“I’m not for that nonviolence stuff anymore,” shouted one of the younger activists.
“If one of those damn white Mississippi crackers touches me, I’m gonna knock the hell out of him,” shouted another.
Later on a discussion of the composition of the march came up.
“This should be an all-black march,” said one marcher. “We don’t need any more white phonies and liberals invading our movement. This is our march.”
Once during the afternoon we stopped to sing, “We Shall Overcome.” The voices rang out with all of the traditional fervor, the glad thunders and the gentle strength that had always characterized the singing of this noble song. But when we came to the stanza which speaks of “black and white together,” the voices of a few of the marchers were muted. I asked them later why they refused to sing that verse. The retort was, “This is a new day, we don’t sing those words anymore. In fact, the whole song should be discarded. Not ‘We Shall Overcome,’ but ‘We Shall Overrun.’ ”
As I listened to all these comments, the words fell on my ears like strange music from a foreign land. My hearing was not attuned to the sound of such bitterness. I guess I should not have been surprised. I should have known that in an atmosphere where false promises are daily realities, where deferred dreams are nightly facts, where acts of unpunished violence toward Negroes are a way of life, nonviolence would eventually be seriously questioned. I should have been reminded that disappointment produces despair and despair produces bitterness, and that the one thing certain about bitterness is its blindness. Bitterness has not the capacity to make the distinction between some and all. When some members of the dominant group, particularly those in power, are racist in attitude and practice, bitterness accuses the whole group.
At the end of the march that first day we all went back to Memphis and spent the night in a Negro motel, since we had not yet secured the tents that would serve as shelter each of the following nights on our journey. The discussion continued at the motel. I decided that I would plead patiently with my brothers to remain true to the time-honored principle of our movement. I began with a plea for nonviolence. This immediately aroused some of our friends from the Deacons for Defense, who contended that self-defense was essential and that therefore nonviolence should not be a prerequisite for participation in the march. They were joined in this view by some of the activists from CORE and SNCC.
I tried to make it clear that besides opposing violence on principle, I could imagine nothing more impractical and disastrous than for any of us, through misguided judgment, to precipitate a violent confrontation in Mississippi. We had neither the resources nor the techniques to win. Furthermore, I asserted, many Mississippi whites, from the government on down, would enjoy nothing more than for us to turn to violence in order to use this as an excuse to wipe out scores of Negroes in and out of the march. Finally, I contended that the debate over the question of self-defense was unnecessary since few people suggested that Negroes should not defend themselves as individuals when attacked. The question was not whether one should use his gun when his home was attacked, but whether it was tactically wise to use a gun while participating in an organized demonstration. If they lowered the banner of nonviolence, I said, Mississippi injustice would not be exposed and the moral issues would be obscured.
Next the question of the participation of whites was raised. Stokely Carmichael contended that the inclusion of whites in the march should be de-emphasized and that the dominant appeal should be made for black participation. Others in the room agreed. As I listened to Stokely, I thought about the years that we had worked together in communities all across the South, and how joyously we had then welcomed and accepted our white allies in the movement. What accounted for this reversal in Stokely’s philosophy?
I surmised that much of the change had its psychological roots in the experience of SNCC in Mississippi during the summer of 1964, when a large number of Northern white students had come down to help in that racially torn state. What the SNCC workers saw was the most articulate, powerful, and self-assured young white people coming to work with the poorest of the Negro people—and simply overwhelming them. That summer Stokely and others in SNCC had probably unconsciously concluded that this was no good for Negroes, for it simply increased their sense of their own inadequacies. Of course, the answer to this dilemma was not to give up, not to conclude that blacks must work with blacks in order for Negroes to gain a sense of their own meaning. The answer was only to be found in persistent trying, perpetual experimentation, persevering togetherness.
Like life, racial understanding is not something that we find but something that we must create. What we find when we enter these mortal plains is existence; but existence is the raw material out of which all life must be created. A productive and happy life is not something you find; it is something you make. And so the ability of Negroes and whites to work together, to understand each other, will not be found ready-made; it must be created by the fact of contact.
Along these lines, I implored everyone in the room to see the morality of making the march completely interracial. Consciences must be enlisted in our movement, I said, not merely racial groups. I reminded them of the dedicated whites who had suffered, bled, and died in the cause of racial justice, and suggested that to reject white participation now would be a shameful repudiation of all for which they had sacrificed.
Finally, I said that the formidable foe we now faced demanded more unity than ever before and that I would stretch every point to maintain this unity, but that I could not in good conscience agree to continue my personal involvement and that of SCLC in the march if it were not publicly affirmed that it was based on nonviolence and the participation of both black and white. After a few more minutes of discussion, Floyd and Stokely agreed that we could unite around these principles as far as the march was concerned. The next morning, we had a joint press conference affirming that the march was nonviolent and that whites were welcomed.
Now I’ve said all along and I still say it, that no individual in our movement can change Mississippi. No one organization in our movement can do the job in Mississippi alone. I have always contended that if all of us get together, we can change the face of Mississippi. This isn’t any time for organizational conflicts, this isn’t any time for ego battles over who’s going to be the leader. We are all the leaders here in this struggle in Mississippi. You see, to change Mississippi we’ve got to be together. We aren’t dealing with a force that has little power. We are dealing with powerful political dynasties, and somehow we must set out to be that David of Truth sent out against the Goliath of Injustice. And we can change this state. And I believe firmly that if we will stick together like this, we are going to do it.
“Black Power!”
As the day progressed, debates and discussions continued, but they were usually pushed to the background by the on-rush of enthusiasm engendered by the large crowds that turned out to greet us in every town. We had been marching for about ten days when we passed through Grenada on the way to Greenwood. Stokely did not conceal his growing eagerness to reach Greenwood. This was SNCC territory, in the sense that the organization had worked courageously there during that turbulent summer of 1964.
As we approached the city, large crowds of old friends and new turned out to welcome us. At a huge mass meeting that night, which was held in a city park, Stokely mounted the platform and after arousing the audience with a powerful attack on Mississippi justice, he proclaimed: “What we need is black power.” Willie Ricks, the fiery orator of SNCC, leaped to the platform and shouted, “What do you want?” The crowd roared “Black Power.” Again and again Ricks cried, “What do you want?” and the response “Black Power” grew louder and louder, until it had reached fever pitch.
So Greenwood turned out to be the arena for the birth of the Black Power slogan in the civil rights movement. The phrase had been used long before by Richard Wright and others, but never until that night had it been used as a slogan in the civil rights movement. For people who had been crushed so long by white power and who had been taught that black was degrading, this slogan had a ready appeal.
Immediately, however, I had reservations about its use. I had the deep feeling that it was an unfortunate choice of words for a slogan. Moreover, I saw it bringing about division within the ranks of the marchers. For a day or two there was fierce competition between those who were wedded to the Black Power slogan and those wedded to Freedom Now. Speakers on each side sought desperately to get the crowds to chant their slogan the loudest.
Now, there is a kind of concrete, real black power that I believe in. I don’t believe in black separatism, I don’t believe in black power that would have racist overtones, but certainly if black power means the amassing of political and economic power in order to gain our just and legitimate goals, then we all believe in that. And I think that all white people of goodwill believe in that.
We are 10 percent of the population of this nation and it would be foolish for me to stand up and tell you we are going to get our freedom by ourselves. There’s going to have to be a coalition of conscience and we aren’t going to be free here in Mississippi and anywhere in the United States until there is a committed empathy on the part of the white man of this country, and he comes to see along with us that segregation denigrates him as much as it does the Negro. I would be misleading you if I made you feel that we could win a violent campaign. It’s impractical even to think about it. The minute we start, we will end up getting many people killed unnecessarily. Now, I’m ready to die myself. Many other committed people are ready to die. If you believe in something firmly, if you believe in it truly, if you believe it in your heart, you are willing to die for it, but I’m not going to advocate a method that brings about unnecessary death.
Sensing this widening split in our ranks, I asked Stokely and Floyd McKissick to join me in a frank discussion of the problem. We met the next morning, along with members of each of our staffs, in a small Catholic parish house in Yazoo City. For five long hours I pleaded with the group to abandon the Black Power slogan. It was my contention that a leader has to be concerned about the problem of semantics. Each word, I said, has a denotative meaning—its explicit and recognized sense—and a connotative meaning—its suggestive sense. While the concept of legitimate black power might be denotatively sound, the slogan “Black Power” carried the wrong connotations. I mentioned the implications of violence that the press had already attached to the phrase. And I went on to say that some of the rash statements on the part of a few marchers only reinforced this impression.
Stokely replied by saying that the question of violence versus nonviolence was irrelevant. The real question was the need for black people to consolidate their political and economic resources to achieve power. “Power,” he said, “is the only thing respected in this world, and we must get it at any cost.” Then he looked me squarely in the eye and said, “Martin, you know as well as I do that practically every other ethnic group in America has done just this. The Jews, the Irish, and the Italians did it, why can’t we?”
“That is just the point,” I answered. “No one has ever heard the Jews publicly chant a slogan of Jewish power, but they have power. Through group unity, determination, and creative endeavor, they have gained it. The same thing is true of the Irish and Italians. Neither group has used a slogan of Irish or Italian power, but they have worked hard to achieve it. This is exactly what we must do,” I said. “We must use every constructive means to amass economic and political power. This is the kind of legitimate power we need. We must work to build racial pride and refute the notion that black is evil and ugly. But this must come through a program, not merely through a slogan.”
Stokely and Floyd insisted that the slogan itself was important. “How can you arouse people to unite around a program without a slogan as a rallying cry? Didn’t the labor movement have slogans? Haven’t we had slogans all along in the freedom movement? What we need is a new slogan with ‘black’ in it.”
I conceded the fact that we must have slogans. But why have one that would confuse our allies, isolate the Negro community, and give many prejudiced whites, who might otherwise be ashamed of their anti-Negro feeling, a ready excuse for self-justification?
Throughout the lengthy discussion, Stokely and Floyd remained adamant, and Stokely concluded by saying, with candor, “Martin, I deliberately decided to raise this issue on the march in order to give it a national forum, and force you to take a stand for Black Power.”
I laughed. “I have been used before,” I said to Stokely. “One more time won’t hurt.”
The meeting ended with the SCLC staff members still agreeing with me that the slogan was unfortunate and would only divert attention from the evils of Mississippi while most CORE and SNCC staff members joined Stokely and Floyd in insisting that it should be projected nationally. In a final attempt to maintain unity I suggested that we compromise by not chanting either “Black Power” or “Freedom Now” for the rest of the march. In this way, neither the people nor the press would be confused by the apparent conflict, and staff members would not appear to be at loggerheads. They all agreed with this compromise.
“A cry of disappointment”
But while the chant died out, the press kept the debate going. News stories now centered, not on the injustices of Mississippi, but on the apparent ideological division in the civil rights movement. Every revolutionary movement has its peaks of united activity and its valleys of debate and internal confusion. This debate might well have been little more than a healthy internal difference of opinion, but the press loves the sensational and it could not allow the issue to remain within the private domain of the movement. In every drama there has to be an antagonist and a protagonist, and if the antagonist is not there the press will find and build one.
So Black Power is now a part of the nomenclature of the national community. To some it is abhorrent, to others dynamic; to some it is repugnant, to others exhilarating; to some it is destructive, to others it is useful. Since Black Power means different things to different people and indeed, being essentially an emotional concept, can mean different things to the same person on differing occasions, it is impossible to attribute its ultimate meaning to any single individual or organization. One must look beyond personal styles, verbal flourishes, and the hysteria of the mass media to assess its values, its assets and liabilities honestly.
First, it is necessary to understand that Black Power is a cry of disappointment. The Black Power slogan did not spring full grown from the head of some philosophical Zeus. It was born from the wounds of despair and disappointment. It was a cry of daily hurt and persistent pain. For centuries the Negro has been caught in the tentacles of white power. Many Negroes have given up faith in the white majority because white power with total control has left them empty-handed. So in reality the call for Black Power is a reaction to the failure of white power.
Many of the young people proclaiming Black Power today were but yesterday the devotees of black-white cooperation and nonviolent direct action. With great sacrifice and dedication and a radiant faith in the future they labored courageously in the rural areas of the South; with idealism they accepted blows without retaliating; with dignity they allowed themselves to be plunged into filthy, stinking jail cells; with a majestic scorn for risk and danger they nonviolently confronted the Jim Clarks and the Bull Connors of the South, and exposed the disease of racism in the body politic. If they are America’s angry children today, this anger is not congenital. It is a response to the feeling that a real solution is hopelessly distant because of the inconsistencies, resistance, and faintheartedness of those in power. If Stokely Carmichael now says that nonviolence is irrelevant, it is because he, as a dedicated veteran of many battles, has seen with his own eyes the most brutal white violence against Negroes and white civil rights workers, and he has seen it go unpunished.
Their frustration is further fed by the fact that even when blacks and whites die together in the cause of justice, the death of the white person gets more attention and concern than the death of the black person. Stokely and his colleagues from SNCC were with us in Alabama when Jimmy Lee Jackson, a brave young Negro man, was killed and when James Reeb, a committed Unitarian white minister, was fatally clubbed to the ground. They remembered how President Johnson sent flowers to the gallant Mrs. Reeb, and in his eloquent “We Shall Overcome” speech paused to mention that one person, James Reeb, had already died in the struggle. Somehow the President forgot to mention Jimmy, who died first. The parents and sister of Jimmy received no flowers from the President. The students felt this keenly. Not that they felt that the death of James Reeb was less than tragic, but because they felt that the failure to mention Jimmy Jackson only reinforced the impression that to white America the life of a Negro is insignificant and meaningless.
“Powerlessness into creative and positive power”
Second, Black Power, in its broad and positive meaning, was a call to black people to amass the political and economic strength to achieve their legitimate goals. No one could deny that the Negro was in dire need of this kind of legitimate power. Indeed, one of the great problems that the Negro confronted was his lack of power. From the old plantations of the South to the newer ghettos of the North, the Negro was confined to a life of voicelessness and powerlessness. Stripped of the right to make decisions concerning his life and destiny, he was subject to the authoritarian and sometimes whimsical decisions of the white power structure. The plantation and the ghetto were created by those who had power both to confine those who had no power and to perpetuate their powerlessness. The problem of transforming the ghetto was, therefore, a problem of power—a confrontation between the forces of power demanding change and the forces of power dedicated to preserving the status quo.
Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political, or economic changes. In this sense power is not only desirable but necessary in order to implement the demands of love and justice. One of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites. Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.
There is nothing essentially wrong with power. The problem is that in America power is unequally distributed. This has led Negro Americans in the past to seek their goals through love and moral suasion devoid of power and white Americans to seek their goals through power devoid of love and conscience. It has led a few extremists to advocate for Negroes the same destructive and conscienceless power that they justly abhorred in whites. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our times.
“THE NECESSITY FOR TEMPORARY SEGREGATION”
There are points at which I see the necessity for temporary segregation in order to get to the integrated society. I can point to some cases. I’ve seen this in the South, in schools being integrated, and I’ve seen it with Teachers’ Associations being integrated. Often when they merge, the Negro is integrated without power. . . . We don’t want to be integrated out of power; we want to be integrated into power.
And this is why I think it is absolutely necessary to see integration in political terms, to see that there are some situations where separation may serve as a temporary way-station to the ultimate goal which we seek, which I think is the only answer in the final analysis to the problem of a truly integrated society.
March 25, 1968
In his struggle for racial justice, the Negro must seek to transform his condition of powerlessness into creative and positive power. To the extent that Black Power advocated the development of political awareness and strength in the Negro community, the election of blacks to key positions, and the use of the bloc vote to liberalize the political climate and achieve our just aspirations for freedom and human dignity, it was a positive and legitimate call to action.
Black Power was also a call for the pooling of black financial resources to achieve economic security. While the ultimate answer to the Negroes’ economic dilemma was in a massive federal program for all the poor along the lines of A. Philip Randolph’s Freedom Budget, a kind of Marshall Plan for the disadvantaged, there was something that the Negro himself could do to throw off the shackles of poverty.
Finally, Black Power was a psychological call to manhood. For years the Negro had been taught that he was nobody, that his color was a sign of his biological depravity, that his being was stamped with an indelible imprint of inferiority, that his whole history was soiled with the filth of worthlessness. All too few people realize how slavery and racial segregation scarred the soul and wounded the spirit of the black man. The whole dirty business of slavery was based on the premise that the Negro was a thing to be used, not a person to be respected. Black Power assumed that Negroes would be slaves unless there was a new power to counter the force of the men who are still determined to be masters rather than brothers.
Black Power was a psychological reaction to the psychological indoctrination that led to the creation of the perfect slave. While this reaction often led to negative and unrealistic responses and frequently brought about intemperate words and actions, one must not overlook the positive value in calling the Negro to a new sense of manhood, to a deep feeling of racial pride, and to an audacious appreciation of his heritage. The Negro had to be grasped by a new realization of his dignity and worth. He had to stand up amid a system that still oppresses him and develop an unassailable and majestic sense of his own value. He could no longer be ashamed of being black.
The job of arousing manhood within a people that had been taught for so many centuries that they were nobody is not easy. Even semantics conspire to make that which is black seem ugly and degrading. In Roget’s Thesaurus there are some 120 synonyms for “blackness” and at least 60 of them are offensive—such words as “blot,” “soot,” “grime,” “devil,” and “foul.” There are some 134 synonyms for “whiteness,” and all are favorable, expressed in such words as “purity,” cleanliness,” “chastity,” and “innocence.” A white lie is better than a black lie. The most degenerate member of a family is the “black sheep,” not the “white sheep.”
The history books, which had almost completely ignored the contribution of the Negro in American history, only served to intensify the Negroes’ sense of worthlessness and to augment the anachronistic doctrine of white supremacy. All too many Negroes and whites are unaware of the fact that the first American to shed blood in the revolution which freed this country from British oppression was a black seaman named Crispus Attucks. Negroes and whites are almost totally oblivious of the fact that it was a Negro physician, Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, who performed the first successful operation on the heart in America. Another Negro physician, Dr. Charles Drew, was largely responsible for developing the method of separating blood plasma and storing it on a large scale, a process that saved thousands of lives in World War II and has made possible many of the important advances in postwar medicine. History books have virtually overlooked the many Negro scientists and inventors who have enriched American life. Although a few refer to George Washington Carver, whose research in agricultural products helped to revive the economy of the South when the throne of King Cotton began to totter, they ignore the contribution of Norbert Rillieux, whose invention of an evaporating pan revolutionized the process of sugar refining. How many people know that the multimillion-dollar United Shoe Machinery Company developed from the shoe-lasting machine invented in the last century by a Negro from Dutch Guiana, Jan Matzeliger; or that Granville T. Woods, an expert in electric motors, whose many patents speeded the growth and improvement of the railroads at the beginning of this century, was a Negro?
Even the Negroes’ contribution to the music of America is sometimes overlooked in astonishing ways. In 1965 my oldest son and daughter entered an integrated school in Atlanta. A few months later my wife and I were invited to attend a program entitled “Music that has made America great.” As the evening unfolded, we listened to the folk songs and melodies of the various immigrant groups. We were certain that the program would end with the most original of all American music, the Negro spiritual. But we were mistaken. Instead, all the students, including our children, ended the program by singing “Dixie.”
As we rose to leave the hall, my wife and I looked at each other with a combination of indignation and amazement. All the students, black and white, all the parents present that night, and all the faculty members had been victimized by just another expression of America’s penchant for ignoring the Negro, making him invisible and making his contributions insignificant. I wept within that night. I wept for my children and all black children who have been denied a knowledge of their heritage; I wept for all white children, who, through daily miseducation, are taught that the Negro is an irrelevant entity in American society; I wept for all the white parents and teachers who are forced to overlook the fact that the wealth of cultural and technological progress in America is a result of the commonwealth of inpouring contributions.
“A slogan that cannot be implemented into a program”
Nevertheless, in spite of the positive aspects of Black Power, which were compatible with what we have sought to do in the civil rights movement without the slogan, its negative values, I believed, prevented it from having the substance and program to become the basic strategy for the civil rights movement.
Beneath all the satisfaction of a gratifying slogan, Black Power was a nihilistic philosophy born out of the conviction that the Negro can’t win. It was, at bottom, the view that American society is so hopelessly corrupt and enmeshed in evil that there is no possibility of salvation from within. Although this thinking is understandable as a response to a white power structure that never completely committed itself to true equality for the Negro, and a die-hard mentality that sought to shut all windows and doors against the winds of change, it nonetheless carried the seeds of its own doom.
Before this century, virtually all revolutions had been based on hope and hate. The hope was expressed in the rising expectation of freedom and justice. What was new about Mahatma Gandhi’s movement in India was that he mounted a revolution on hope and love, hope and nonviolence. This same new emphasis characterized the civil rights movement in our country dating from the Montgomery bus boycott of 1956 to the Selma movement of 1965. We maintained the hope while transforming the hate of traditional revolutions into positive nonviolent power. As long as the hope was fulfilled there was little questioning of nonviolence. But when the hopes were blasted, when people came to see that in spite of progress their conditions were still insufferable, when they looked out and saw more poverty, more school segregation, and more slums, despair began to set in.
But revolution, though born of despair, cannot long be sustained by despair. This was the ultimate contradiction of the Black Power movement. It claimed to be the most revolutionary wing of the social revolution taking place in the United States. Yet it rejected the one thing that keeps the fire of revolutions burning: the ever-present flame of hope. When hope dies, a revolution degenerates into an undiscriminating catchall for evanescent and futile gestures. The Negro cannot entrust his destiny to a philosophy nourished solely on despair, to a slogan that cannot be implemented into a program.
Over cups of coffee in my home in Atlanta and my apartment in Chicago, I often talked late at night and over into the small hours of the morning with proponents of Black Power who argued passionately about the validity of violence and riots. They didn’t quote Gandhi or Tolstoy. Their Bible was Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. This black psychiatrist from Martinique, who went to Algeria to work with the National Liberation Front in its fight against the French, argued in his book—a well-written book, incidentally, with many penetrating insights—that violence is a psychologically healthy and tactically sound method for the oppressed. And so, realizing that they are a part of that vast company of the “wretched of the earth,” young American Negroes, who were involved in the Black Power movement, often quoted Fanon’s belief that violence is the only thing that will bring about liberation.
The plain, inexorable fact was that any attempt of the American Negro to overthrow his oppressor with violence would not work. We did not need President Johnson to tell us this by reminding Negro rioters that they were outnumbered ten to one. The courageous efforts of our own insurrectionist brothers, such as Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, should be eternal reminders to us that violent rebellion is doomed from the start. Anyone leading a violent rebellion must be willing to make an honest assessment regarding the possible casualties to a minority population confronting a well-armed, wealthy majority with a fanatical right wing that would delight in exterminating thousands of black men, women, and children.
Occasionally Negroes contended that the 1965 Watts riot and other riots in various cities represented effective civil rights action. But those who expressed this view always ended up with stumbling words when asked what concrete gains were won as a result. At best the riots produced a little additional anti-poverty money, allotted by frightened government officials, and a few water sprinklers to cool the children of the ghettos. Nowhere did the riots win any concrete improvement such as did the organized protest demonstrations.
When one tries to pin down advocates of violence as to what acts would be effective, the answers are blatantly illogical. Sometimes they talk of overthrowing racist state and local governments. They fail to see that no internal revolution has ever succeeded in overthrowing a government by violence unless the government had already lost the allegiance and effective control of its armed forces. Anyone in his right mind knows that this will not happen in the United States.
Nonviolence is power, but it is the right and good use of power. Constructively it can save the white man as well as the Negro. Racial segregation is buttressed by such irrational fears as loss of preferred economic privilege, altered social status, intermarriage, and adjustment to new situations. Through sleepless nights and haggard days, numerous white people struggled pitifully to combat these fears. By following the path of escape, some seek to ignore questions of race relations, and to close their minds to the issues involved. Others, placing their faith in legal maneuvers, counsel massive resistance. Still others hope to drown their fears by engaging in acts of meanness and violence toward their Negro brethren. But, how futile are all these remedies! Instead of eliminating fear, they instill deeper and more pathological fears. The white man, through his own efforts, through education and goodwill, through searching his conscience and through confronting the fact of integration, must do a great deal to free himself of these paralyzing fears. But to master fear he must also depend on the spirit the Negro generates toward him. Only through our adherence to nonviolence—which also means love in its strong and commanding sense—will the fear in the white community be mitigated.
“A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus”
People have said to me, “Since violence is the new cry, isn’t there a danger that you will lose touch with the people in the ghetto and be out of step with the times if you don’t change your views on nonviolence?”
My answer is always the same. While I am convinced that the vast majority of Negroes reject violence, even if they did not I would not be interested in being a consensus leader. I refuse to determine what is right by taking a Gallup poll of the trends of the time. I imagine that there were leaders in Germany who sincerely opposed what Hitler was doing to the Jews. But they took their poll and discovered that anti-Semitism was the prevailing trend. In order to “be in step with the times,” in order to “keep in touch,” they yielded to one of the most ignominious evils that history has ever known.
Ultimately, a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus. If every Negro in the United States turns to violence, I will choose to be that one lone voice preaching that this is the wrong way. Maybe this sounds like arrogance. But it is not intended that way. It is simply my way of saying that I would rather be a man of conviction than a man of conformity. Occasionally in life one develops a conviction so precious and meaningful that he will stand on it till the end. This is what I have found in nonviolence.
I cannot make myself believe that God wanted me to hate. I’m tired of violence, I’ve seen too much of it. I’ve seen such hate on the faces of too many sheriffs in the South. And I’m not going to let my oppressor dictate to me what method I must use. Our oppressors have used violence. Our oppressors have used hatred. Our oppressors have used rifles and guns. I’m not going to stoop down to their level. I want to rise to a higher level. We have a power that can’t be found in Molotov cocktails.
One of the greatest paradoxes of the Black Power movement was that it talked unceasingly about not imitating the values of white society, but in advocating violence it was imitating the worst, the most brutal, and the most uncivilized value of American life. American Negroes had not been mass murderers. They had not murdered children in Sunday school, nor had they hung white men on trees bearing strange fruit. They had not been hooded perpetrators of violence, lynching human beings at will and drowning them at whim.
I am concerned that Negroes achieve full status as citizens and as human beings here in the United States. But I am also concerned about our moral uprightness and the health of our souls. Therefore I must oppose any attempt to gain our freedom by the methods of malice, hate, and violence that have characterized our oppressors. Hate is just as injurious to the hater as it is to the hated. Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Many of our inner conflicts are rooted in hate. This is why the psychiatrists say, “Love or perish.” Hate is too great a burden to bear.
Humanity is waiting for something other than blind imitation of the past. If we want truly to advance a step further, if we want to turn over a new leaf and really set a new man afoot, we must begin to turn mankind away from the long and desolate night of violence. May it not be that the new man the world needs is the nonviolent man? Longfellow said, “In this world a man must either be an anvil or a hammer.” We must be hammers shaping a new society rather than anvils molded by the old. This not only will make us new men, but will give us a new kind of power. It will not be Lord Acton’s image of power that tends to corrupt or absolute power that corrupts absolutely. It will be power infused with love and justice, that will change dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows, and lift us from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope. A dark, desperate, confused, and sin-sick world waits for this new kind of man and this new kind of power.
30
BEYOND VIETNAM
Today, young men of America are fighting, dying, and killing in Asian jungles in a war whose purposes are so ambiguous the whole nation seethes with dissent. They are told they are sacrificing for democracy, but the Saigon regime, their ally, is a mockery of democracy and the black American soldier has himself never experienced democracy.
All my adult life I have deplored violence and war as instruments for achieving solutions to mankind’s problems. I am firmly committed to the creative power of nonviolence as the force which is capable of winning lasting and meaningful brotherhood and peace. As a minister, a Nobel Prize holder, a civil rights leader, a Negro, a father, and above all as an American, I have wrestled with my conscience.
Despite this—whether right or wrong—in the summer and fall of 1965, after President Johnson declared himself willing to negotiate, I believed that it was essential for all Americans to publicly avoid the debate on why we were waging war in the far-off lands of Vietnam. I believed that the crucial problem which faced Americans was how to move with great speed and without more bloodshed from the battlefield to the peace table. The issues of culpability and morality, while important, had to be subordinated lest they divert or divide. The President’s strong declaration to negotiate, to talk peace, and thus end the death and destruction, had to be accepted, honored, and implemented.
Accepting this premise, my public statements, while condemning all militarism, were directed mainly to the mechanics for achieving an immediate cessation of hostilities. I did not march, I did not demonstrate, I did not rally. I petitioned in direct meetings with the President, and at his invitation with U.N. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg. In my meeting with Ambassador Goldberg, in September 1965, I urged that our efforts to seek peace by negotiations could be speeded by agreeing to negotiate directly with the National Liberation Front, by admitting Red China to the U.N., and by halting the bombing of North Vietnam.
For a while, knowing that my wife shares my passion for peace, I decided that I would leave it to her to take the stands and make the meetings on the peace issue and leave me to concentrate on civil rights. But as the hopeful days became disappointing months, I began the agonizing measurement of government promising words of peace against the baneful, escalating deeds of war. Doubts gnawed at my conscience. Uncertain, but still trusting, we watched setbacks in the search for peace and advances in the search for military advantage.
Some of my friends of both races and others who do not consider themselves my friends expressed disapproval because I had been voicing concern over the war in Vietnam. In newspaper columns and editorials, both in the Negro and general press, it was indicated that Martin King, Jr., is “getting out of his depth.” I was chided, even by fellow civil rights leaders, members of Congress, and brothers of the cloth for “not sticking to the business of civil rights.”
I agonized a great deal over this whole problem. I went away for two months to do a lot of thinking, but basically to write a book. I had a chance to reflect, to meditate, and to think. I thought about civil rights and I thought about the world situation and I thought about America.
Something said to me, “Martin, you have got to stand up on this. No matter what it means.” I didn’t rush into it. I didn’t just decide to do it on a moment’s notice. I had my own vacillations and I asked questions of whether on the one hand I should do it or whether I shouldn’t.
As I went through this period one night I picked up an article entitled “The Children of Vietnam,” and I read it. And after reading that article, I said to myself, “Never again will I be silent on an issue that is destroying the soul of our nation and destroying thousands and thousands of little children in Vietnam.” I came to the conclusion that there is an existential moment in your life when you must decide to speak for yourself; nobody else can speak for you.
“I was a loud speaker but a quiet actor”
In February 1967, the slender cord which held me threatened to break as our government spurned the simple peace offer—conveyed by one no less than the authorized head of the Soviet Union—to halt our bombing of North Vietnam, not the bombing of all of Vietnam, in return for fully occupied seats at a peace table. We rejected it by demanding a military quid pro quo.
As I look back, I acknowledge that this end of faith was not sudden; it came like the ebbing of a tide. As I reviewed the events, I saw an orderly buildup of evil, an accumulation of inhumanities, each of which alone was sufficient to make men hide in shame. What was woeful, but true, was that my country was only talking peace but was bent on military victory. Inside the glove of peace was the clenched fist of war. I now stood naked with shame and guilt, as indeed every German should have when his government was using its military power to overwhelm other nations. Whether right or wrong, I had for too long allowed myself to be a silent onlooker. At best, I was a loud speaker but a quiet actor, while a charade was being performed.
So often I had castigated those who by silence or inaction condoned and thereby cooperated with the evils of racial injustice. Had I not, again and again, said that the silent onlooker must bear the responsibility for the brutalities committed by the Bull Connors, or by the murderers of the innocent children in a Birmingham church? Had I not committed myself to the principle that looking away from evil is, in effect, a condoning of it? Those who lynch, pull the trigger, point the cattle prod, or open the fire hoses act in the name of the silent. I had to therefore speak out if I was to erase my name from the bombs which fall over North or South Vietnam, from the canisters of napalm. The time had come—indeed it was past due—when I had to disavow and dissociate myself from those who in the name of peace burn, maim, and kill.
More than that, I had to go from the pulpits and platforms. I had to return to the streets to mobilize men to assemble and petition, in the spirit of our own revolutionary history, for the immediate end of this bloody, immoral, obscene slaughter—for a cause which cries out for a solution before mankind itself is doomed. I could do no less for the salvation of my soul.
I had lived and worked in ghettos throughout the nation, and I traveled tens of thousands of miles each month into dozens of Northern and Southern Negro communities. My direct personal experience with Negroes in all walks of life convinced me that there was deep and widespread disenchantment with the war in Vietnam—first, because they were against war itself, and second, because they felt it has caused a significant and alarming diminishing of concern and attention to civil rights progress. I had held these views for a long time, but Negroes in so many circles urged me to articulate their concern and frustration. They felt civil rights was well on its way to becoming a neglected and forgotten issue long before it was even partially solved.
The great tragedy was that our government declared a war against poverty, and yet it only financed a skirmish against poverty. And this led to great despair. It led to great cynicism and discontent throughout the Negro community. I had lived in the ghettos of Chicago and Cleveland, and I knew the hurt and the cynicism and the discontent. And the fact was that every city in our country was sitting on a potential powderkeg.
* * *
As I moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart—as I called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam—many persons questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concern, this query has often loomed large and loud: “Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent?” “Peace and civil rights don’t mix,” they say. And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I nevertheless am greatly saddened that such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment, or my calling. They seem to forget that before I was a civil rights leader, I answered a call, and when God speaks, who can but prophesy. I answered a call which left the spirit of the Lord upon me and anointed me to preach the gospel. And during the early days of my ministry, I read the Apostle Paul saying, “Be ye not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of minds.” I decided then that I was going to tell the truth as God revealed it to me. No matter how many people disagreed with me, I decided that I was going to tell the truth.
I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church—the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate—leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.
There is . . . a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor—both black and white—through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor. . . .
As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, “What about Vietnam?” They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.
Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read “Vietnam.” It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that “America will be” are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.
As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Peace Prize was also a commission, a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for the brotherhood of man. This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances.
But even if it were not present, I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the Good News was meant for all men—for communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that He died for them? What then can I say to the Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?
Finally, as I try to explain for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place, I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood. Because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for His suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them. This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation, for those it calls “enemy,” for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers. . . .
The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing Clergy and Laymen Concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. So such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.
In 1957, a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which has now justified the presence of U.S. military advisors in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investment accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru.
It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken: the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say: “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.
A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood. . . .
These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and, out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. We in the West must support these revolutions.
It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when “every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.”
A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies. . . .
We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.
Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message—of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.
When I first took my position against the war in Vietnam, almost every newspaper in the country criticized me. It was a low period in my life. I could hardly open a newspaper. It wasn’t only white people either; it was Negroes. But then I remember a newsman coming to me one day and saying, “Dr. King, don’t you think you’re going to have to change your position now because so many people are criticizing you? And people who once had respect for you are going to lose respect for you. And you’re going to hurt the budget, I understand, of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; people have cut off support. And don’t you think that you have to move now more in line with the administration’s policy?” That was a good question, because he was asking me the question of whether I was going to think about what happens to me or what happens to truth and justice in this situation.
On some positions, Cowardice asks the question, “Is it safe?” Expediency asks the question, “Is it politic?” And Vanity comes along and asks the question, “Is it popular?” But Conscience asks the question, “Is it right?” And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must do it because Conscience tells him it is right.
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of convenience, but where he stands in moments of challenge, moments of great crisis and controversy. And this is where I choose to cast my lot today. And this is why I wanted to go through with this, because I think this is where SCLC should be. There may be others who want to go another way, but when I took up the cross I recognized its meaning. It is not something that you merely put your hands on. It is not something that you wear. The cross is something that you bear and ultimately that you die on. The cross may mean the death of your popularity. It may mean the death of your bridge to the White House. It may mean the death of a foundation grant. It may cut your budget down a little, but take up your cross and just bear it. And that is the way I have decided to go. Come what may, it doesn’t matter now.
A myth about my views on Vietnam credited me with advocating the fusion of the civil rights and peace movements, and I was criticized for such a “serious tactical mistake.” I held no such view. In a formal public resolution, my organization, SCLC, and I explicitly declared that we had no intention of diverting or diminishing our activities in civil rights, and we outlined extensive programs for the immediate future in the South as well as in Chicago.
I was saddened that the board of directors of the NAACP, a fellow civil rights organization, would join in the perpetuation of the myth about my views. They challenged and repudiated a nonexistent proposition. SCLC and I expressed our view on the war and drew attention to its damaging effects on civil rights programs, a fact we believed to be incontrovertible and, therefore, mandatory to express in the interest of the struggle for equality. I challenged the NAACP and other critics of my position to take a forthright stand on the rightness or wrongness of this war, rather than going off creating a nonexistent issue.
I am a clergyman as well as a civil rights leader and the moral roots of our war policy are not unimportant to me. I do not believe our nation can be a moral leader of justice, equality, and democracy if it is trapped in the role of a self-appointed world policeman. Throughout my career in the civil rights movement I have been concerned about justice for all people. For instance, I strongly feel that we must end not merely poverty among Negroes but poverty among white people. Likewise, I have always insisted on justice for all the world over, because justice is indivisible. And injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. I will not stand idly by when I see an unjust war taking place without in any way diminishing my activity in civil rights, just as millions of Negro and white people are doing day in and day out.
This war played havoc with the destiny of the entire world. It tore up the Geneva Agreement, seriously impaired the United Nations, exacerbated the hatreds between continents and, worse still, between races. It frustrated our development at home, telling our own underprivileged citizens that we place insatiable military demands above their most critical needs; it greatly contributed to the forces of reaction in America and strengthened the military-industrial complex against which even President Eisenhower solemnly warned us; it practically destroyed Vietnam and left thousands of American and Vietnamese youth maimed and mutilated; and it exposed the whole world to the risk of nuclear warfare.
The Johnson Administration seemed amazingly devoid of statesmanship, and when creative statesmanship wanes, irrational militarism increases. President Kennedy was a man who was big enough to admit when he was wrong—as he did after the Bay of Pigs incident. But Johnson seemed to be unable to make this kind of statesmanlike gesture in connection with Vietnam. Even when he could readily summon popular support to end the bombing in Vietnam, he persisted. Yet bombs in Vietnam also exploded at home; they destroyed the hopes and possibilities for a decent America.
I followed a policy of being very honest with President Johnson when he consulted me about civil rights. I went to the White House when he invited me. I made it very clear to him why I had taken a stand against the war in Vietnam. I had a long talk with him on the telephone about this and made it clear to him I would be standing up against it even more. I was not centering this on President Johnson. I thought there was collective guilt. Four Presidents participated in some way leading us to the war in Vietnam. So, I am not going to put it all on President Johnson. What I was concerned about was that we end the nightmarish war and free our souls.
There isn’t a single official of our country that can go anywhere in the world without being stoned and eggs being thrown at him. It’s because we have taken on to ourselves a kind of arrogance of power. We’ve ignored the mandates of justice and morality. And I don’t know about you, but I wish I could make a witness more positive about this thing. I wish I was of draft age. I wish I did not have my ministerial exemption. I tell you this morning, I would not fight in the war in Vietnam. I’d go to jail before I’d do it. And I say to the federal government or anybody else: they can do to me what they did to Dr. Spock and William Sloan Coffin, my good friend, the chaplain of Yale. They can just as well get ready to convict me, because I’m going to continue to say to young men, that if you feel it in your heart that this war is wrong, unjust, and objectionable, don’t go and fight in it. Follow the path of Jesus Christ.
31
THE POOR PEOPLE’S CAMPAIGN
We have moved into an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society. We are still called upon to give aid to the beggar who finds himself in misery and agony on life’s highway. But one day, we must ask the question of whether an edifice which produces beggars must not be restructured and refurbished. That is where we are now.
MAY 22, 1967
At an SCLC staff retreat King calls for a radical redistribution of economic and political power
DECEMBER 4
Launches the Poor People’s Campaign
MARCH 18, 1968
Speaks to striking sanitation workers in Memphis
MARCH 28
Leads Memphis march that is disrupted by violence
In November 1967 the staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference held one of the most important meetings we ever convened. We had intensive discussions and analyses of our work and of the challenges which confront us and our nation. At the end, we made a decision: the SCLC would lead waves of the nation’s poor and disinherited to Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1968 to demand redress of their grievances by the United States government and to secure at least jobs or income for all.
We had learned from hard and bitter experience in our movement that our government did not move to correct a problem involving race until it was confronted directly and dramatically. It required a Selma before the fundamental right to vote was written into the federal statutes. It took a Birmingham before the government moved to open doors of public accommodations to all human beings. What we now needed was a new kind of Selma or Birmingham to dramatize the economic plight of the Negro, and compel the government to act.
We would go to Washington and demand to be heard, and we would stay until America responded. If this meant forcible repression of our movement, we would confront it, for we have done this before. If this meant scorn or ridicule, we embrace it for that is what America’s poor now receive. If it meant jail, we accepted it willingly, for the millions of poor were already imprisoned by exploitation and discrimination. But we hoped, with growing confidence, that our campaign in Washington would receive a sympathetic understanding across our nation, followed by dramatic expansion of nonviolent demonstrations in Washington and simultaneous protests elsewhere. In short we would be petitioning our government for specific reforms, and we intended to build militant nonviolent actions until that government moves against poverty.
We intended to channel the smouldering rage and frustration of Negro people into an effective, militant, and nonviolent movement of massive proportions in Washington and other areas. Similarly, we would be calling on the swelling masses of young people in this country who were disenchanted with this materialistic society and asking them to join us in our new Washington movement. We also looked for participation by representatives of the millions of non-Negro poor—Indians, Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans, Appalachians, and others. And we welcomed assistance from all Americans of goodwill.
And so, we decided to go to Washington and to use any means of legitimate nonviolent protest necessary to move our nation and our government on a new course of social, economic, and political reform. In the final analysis, SCLC decided to go to Washington because, if we did not act, we would be abdicating our responsibilities as an organization committed to nonviolence and freedom. We were keeping that commitment, and we called on America to join us in our Washington campaign. In this way, we could work creatively against the despair and indifference that so often caused our nation to be immobilized during the cold winter and shaken profoundly in the hot summer.
“New tactics which do not count on government goodwill”
The policy of the federal government is to play Russian roulette with riots; it is prepared to gamble with another summer of disaster. Despite two consecutive summers of violence, not a single basic cause of riots has been corrected. All of the misery that stoked the flames of rage and rebellion remains undiminished. With unemployment, intolerable housing, and discriminatory education, a scourge in Negro ghettos, Congress and the administration still tinker with trivial, halfhearted measures.
Yet only a few years ago, there was discernible, if limited, progress through nonviolence. Each year, a wholesome, vibrant Negro self-confidence was taking shape. The fact is inescapable that the tactic of nonviolence, which had then dominated the thinking of the civil rights movement, has in the last two years not been playing its transforming role. Nonviolence was a creative doctrine in the South because it checkmated the rabid segregationists who were thirsting for an opportunity to physically crush Negroes. Nonviolent direct action enabled the Negro to take to the streets in active protest, but it muzzled the guns of the oppressor because even he could not shoot down in daylight unarmed men, women, and children. This is the reason there was less loss of life in ten years of Southern protest than in ten days of Northern riots. . . .
I agree with the President’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders that our nation is splitting into two hostile societies and that the chief destructive cutting edge is white racism. We need, above all, effective means to force Congress to act resolutely—but means that do not involve the use of violence.
The time has come for a return to mass nonviolent protest. Accordingly, we are planning a series of such demonstrations this spring and summer, to begin in Washington, D.C. They will have Negro and white participation, and they will seek to benefit the poor of both races.
“A TESTAMENT OF HOPE”
The nation waited until the black man was explosive with fury before stirring itself even to partial concern. Confronted now with the interrelated problems of war, inflation, urban decay, white backlash, and a climate of violence, it is now forced to address itself to race relations and poverty, and it is tragically unprepared. What might once have been a series of separate problems now merge into a social crisis of almost stupefying complexity.
I am not sad that black Americans are rebelling; this was not only inevitable but eminently desirable. Without this magnificent ferment among Negroes, the old evasions and procrastinations would have continued indefinitely. Black men have slammed the door shut on a past of deadening passivity. Except for the Reconstruction years, they have never in their long history on American soil struggled with such creativity and courage for their freedom. These are our bright years of emergence; though they are painful ones, they cannot be avoided.
1968
“Find a way to put pressure on them”
We know from past experience that Congress and the President wouldn’t do anything until we developed a movement around which people of goodwill could find a way to put pressure on them, because it really meant breaking that coalition in Congress. It was still a coalition-dominated, rural-dominated, basically Southern Congress. There were Southerners there with committee chairmanships, and they were going to stand in the way of progress as long as they could. They got enough right-wing Midwestern or Northern Republicans to go along with them.
This really meant making the movement powerful enough, dramatic enough, morally appealing enough so that people of goodwill—the churches, labor, liberals, intellectuals, students, poor people themselves—began to put pressure on congressmen to the point that they could no longer elude our demands.
Our idea was to dramatize the whole economic problem of the poor. We felt there was a great deal that we needed to do to appeal to Congress itself. The early demonstrations would be more geared toward educational purposes—to educate the nation on the nature of the problem and the crucial aspects of it, the tragic conditions that we confront in the ghettos. After that, if we had not gotten a response from Congress, we would branch out. And we were honest enough to feel that we weren’t going to get any instantaneous results from Congress, knowing its recalcitrant nature on this issue, and knowing that so many resources and energies were being used in Vietnam rather than on the domestic situation. So we didn’t have any illusions about moving Congress in two or three weeks. But we did feel that, by starting in Washington, centering on Congress and departments of the government, we would be able to do a real educational job.
We called our demonstration a campaign for jobs and income because we felt that the economic question was the most crucial that black people, and poor people generally, were confronting. There was a literal depression in the Negro community. When you have mass unemployment in the Negro community, it’s called a social problem; when you have mass unemployment in the white community, it’s called a depression.
We would begin activity around Washington, but as that activity was beginning, some people would be talking to Washington. Some would be coming on mules to Washington. Some would be in their buggies being pulled by the mules. And we would have a mule train, all moving toward Washington, so that we would have forces moving out of the South—Mississippi joining forces with Alabama, Alabama joining with Georgia, Georgia joining with South Carolina, South Carolina with North Carolina with Virginia, and right on into Washington. Other forces would be coming up out of Chicago and Detroit and Cleveland and Milwaukee, others coming down from Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore—all moving toward Washington.
We would place the problems of the poor at the seat of government of the wealthiest nation in the history of mankind. If that power refused to acknowledge its debt to the poor, it would have failed to live up to its promise to insure “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” to its citizens. If this society fails, I fear that we will hear very shortly that racism is a sickness unto death.
The American people are infected with racism—that is the peril. Paradoxically, they are also infected with democratic ideals—that is the hope. While doing wrong, they have the potential to do right. But they do not have a millennium to make changes. Nor have they a choice of continuing in the old way. The future they are asked to inaugurate is not so unpalatable that it justifies the evils that beset the nation. To end poverty, to extirpate prejudice, to free a tormented conscience, to make a tomorrow of justice, fair play, and creativity—all these are worthy of the American ideal.
We have, through massive nonviolent action, an opportunity to avoid a national disaster and create a new spirit of class and racial harmony. We can write another luminous moral chapter in American history. All of us are on trial in this troubled hour, but time still permits us to meet the future with a clear conscience.
We have the power to change America and give a kind of new vitality to the religion of Jesus Christ. And we can get those young men and women who’ve lost faith in the church to see that Jesus was a serious man precisely because he dealt with the tang of the human amid the glow of the Divine and that he was concerned about their problems. He was concerned about bread; he opened and started Operation Breadbasket a long time ago. He initiated the first sit-in movement. The greatest revolutionary that history has ever known. And when people tell us when we stand up that we got our inspiration from this or that, go back and let them know where we got our inspiration.
I read Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto years ago when I was a student in college. And many of the revolutionary movements in the world came into being as a result of what Marx talked about.
The great tragedy is that Christianity failed to see that it had the revolutionary edge. You don’t have to go to Karl Marx to learn how to be a revolutionary. I didn’t get my inspiration from Karl Marx; I got it from a man named Jesus, a Galilean saint who said he was anointed to heal the broken-hearted. He was anointed to deal with the problems of the poor. And that is where we get our inspiration. And we go out in a day when we have a message for the world, and we can change this world and we can change this nation.
“A great movement in Memphis”
During one week in March 1968 I made about thirty-five speeches. I started out on Thursday in Grosse Point, Michigan. I had to speak four times in Detroit on Friday. Saturday I went to Los Angeles. I had to speak five times. Then on Sunday I preached in three churches in Los Angeles. And I flew from there to Memphis.
RESOLUTIONS
And I’m simply saying this morning, that you should resolve that you will never become so secure in your thinking or your living that you forget the least of these. . . . In some sense, all of us are the least of these, but there are some who are least than the least of these. I try to get it over to my children early, morning after morning, when I get a chance. As we sit at the table, as we did this morning in morning devotions, I couldn’t pray my prayer without saying, “God, help us, as we sit at this table to realize that there are those who are less fortunate than we are. And grant that we will never forget them, no matter where we are.” And I said to my little children, “I’m going to work and do everything that I can do to see that you get a good education. I don’t ever want you to forget that there are millions of God’s children who will not and cannot get a good education, and I don’t want you feeling that you are better than they are. For you will never be what you ought to be until they are what they ought to be.”
From sermon on January 7, 1968
As I came in to Memphis, I turned around and said to Ralph Abernathy, “They really have a great movement here in Memphis.” The issue was the refusal of Memphis to be fair and honest in its dealings with its public servants, who happened to be sanitation workers. One thousand three hundred sanitation workers were on strike, and Memphis was not being fair to them. They were demonstrating something there that needed to be demonstrated all over our country. They were demonstrating that we can stick together and they were demonstrating that we are all tied in a single garment of destiny, and that if one black person suffers, if one black person is down, we are all down. The Negro “haves” must join hands with the Negro “have-nots.” And armed with the compassionate traveler’s check, they must journey into that other country of their brother’s denial and hurt and exploitation. One day our society will come to respect the sanitation worker if it is to survive, for the person who picks up our garbage is in the final analysis as significant as the physician, for if he doesn’t do his job, diseases are rampant. All labor has dignity.
Now let me say a word to those of you who are on strike. You have been out now for a number of days, but don’t despair. Nothing worthwhile is gained without sacrifice. The thing for you to do is stay together and say to everybody in this community that you are going to stick it out to the end until every demand is met, and that you are going to say, “We ain’t gonna let nobody turn us around.” Let it be known everywhere that along with wages and all of the other securities that you are struggling for, you are also struggling for the right to organize and to be recognized.
We can all get more together than we can apart. And this is the way we gain power. Power is the ability to achieve purpose, power is the ability to affect change, and we need power. And I want you to stick it out so that you will be able to make Mayor Loeb and others say “Yes,” even when they want to say “No.”
Now the other thing is that nothing is gained without pressure. Don’t let anybody tell you to go back on the job and paternalistically say, “Now you are my men and I’m going to do the right thing for you. Just come on back on the job.” Don’t go back on the job until the demands are met. Never forget that freedom is not something that is voluntarily given by the oppressor. It is something that must be demanded by the oppressed. Freedom is not some lavish dish that the power structure and the white forces in policy-making positions will voluntarily hand out on a silver platter while the Negro merely furnishes the appetite. If we are going to get equality, if we are going to get adequate wages, we are going to have to struggle for it. . . .
You know Jesus reminded us in a magnificent parable one day that a man went to hell because he didn’t see the poor. His name was Dives. And there was a man by the name of Lazarus who came daily to his gate in need of the basic necessities of life and Dives didn’t do anything about it. And he ended up going to hell. There is nothing in that parable which says that Dives went to hell because he was rich. Jesus never made a universal indictment against all wealth. It is true that one day a rich young ruler came to Him talking about eternal life and he advised him to sell all, but in that instance Jesus was prescribing individual surgery, not setting forth a universal diagnosis. If you will go on and read that parable in all of its dimensions and its symbolism you will remember that a conversation took place between heaven and hell. And on the other end of that long distance call between heaven and hell was Abraham in heaven talking to Dives in hell. It wasn’t a millionaire in hell talking with a poor man in heaven, it was a little millionaire in hell talking with a multimillionaire in heaven. Dives didn’t go to hell because he was rich. His wealth was his opportunity to bridge the gulf that separated him from his brother Lazarus. Dives went to hell because he allowed Lazarus to become invisible. Dives went to hell because he allowed the means by which he lived to outdistance the ends for which he lived. Dives went to hell because he sought to be a conscientious objector in the war against poverty.
And I come by here to say that America too is going to hell if she doesn’t use her wealth. If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty and make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life, she too will go to hell. I will hear America through her historians, years and generations to come, saying, “We built gigantic buildings to kiss the skies. We built gargantuan bridges to span the seas. Through our space ships we were able to carve highways through the stratosphere. Through our submarines we were able to penetrate oceanic depths.” It seems that I can hear the God of the universe saying, “Even though you have done all of that, I was hungry and you fed me not. I was naked and you clothed me not. The children of my sons and daughters were in need of economic security and you didn’t provide it for them. And so you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness.” This may well be the indictment on America. And that same voice says in Memphis to the mayor, to the power structure, “If you do it unto the least of these of my children you do it unto me.”
. . . Having to live under the threat of death every day, sometimes I feel discouraged. Having to take so much abuse and criticism, sometimes from my own people, sometimes I feel discouraged. Having to go to bed so often frustrated with the chilly winds of adversity about to stagger me, sometimes I feel discouraged and feel my work’s in vain.
But then the holy spirit revives my soul again. In Gilead, there is balm to make the wounded whole. If we will believe that, we will build a new Memphis. And bring about the day when every valley shall be exalted. Every mountain and hill will be made low. The rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places straight. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.
32
UNFULFILLED DREAMS
APRIL 3, 1968
Delivers final address at Bishop Charles J. Mason Temple in Memphis
APRIL 4
Is assassinated at Lorraine Motel
I guess one of the great agonies of life is that we are constantly trying to finish that which is unfinishable. We are commanded to do that. And so we, like David, find ourselves in so many instances having to face the fact that our dreams are not fulfilled.
Life is a continual story of shattered dreams. Mahatma Gandhi labored for years and years for the independence of his people. But Gandhi had to face the fact that he was assassinated and died with a broken heart, because that nation that he wanted to unite ended up being divided between India and Pakistan as a result of the conflict between the Hindus and the Moslems.
Woodrow Wilson dreamed a dream of a League of Nations, but he died before the promise was delivered.
The Apostle Paul talked one day about wanting to go to Spain. It was Paul’s greatest dream to go to Spain, to carry the gospel there. Paul never got to Spain. He ended up in a prison cell in Rome. This is the story of life.
So many of our forebears used to sing about freedom. And they dreamed of the day that they would be able to get out of the bosom of slavery, the long night of injustice. And they used to sing little songs: “Nobody knows de trouble I seen, nobody knows but Jesus.” They thought about a better day as they dreamed their dream. And they would say, “I’m so glad the trouble don’t last always. By and by, by and by I’m going to lay down my heavy load.” And they used to sing it because of a powerful dream. But so many died without having the dream fulfilled.
And each of you in some way is building some kind of temple. The struggle is always there. It gets discouraging sometimes. It gets very disenchanting sometimes. Some of us are trying to build a temple of peace. We speak out against war, we protest, but it seems that your head is going against a concrete wall. It seems to mean nothing. And so often as you set out to build the temple of peace you are left lonesome; you are left discouraged; you are left bewildered.
Well, that is the story of life. And the thing that makes me happy is that I can hear a voice crying through the vista of time, saying: “It may not come today or it may not come tomorrow, but it is well that it is within thine heart. It’s well that you are trying.” You may not see it. The dream may not be fulfilled, but it’s just good that you have a desire to bring it into reality. It’s well that it’s in thine heart.
Now let me bring out another point. Whenever you set out to build a creative temple, whatever it may be, you must face the fact that there is a tension at the heart of the universe between good and evil. Hinduism refers to this as a struggle between illusion and reality. Platonic philosophy used to refer to it as a tension between body and soul. Zoroastrianism, a religion of old, used to refer to it as a tension between the god of light and the god of darkness. Traditional Judaism and Christianity refer to it as a tension between God and Satan. Whatever you call it, there is a struggle in the universe between good and evil.
Now not only is that struggle structured out somewhere in the external forces of the universe, it’s structured in our own lives. Psychologists have tried to grapple with it in their way, and so they say various things. Sigmund Freud used to say that this tension is a tension between what he called the id and the superego. Some of us feel that it’s a tension between God and man. And in every one of us, there’s a war going on. It’s a civil war. I don’t care who you are, I don’t care where you live, there is a civil war going on in your life. And every time you set out to be good, there’s something pulling on you, telling you to be evil. It’s going on in your life. Every time you set out to love, something keeps pulling on you, trying to get you to hate. Every time you set out to be kind and say nice things about people, something is pulling on you to be jealous and envious and to spread evil gossip about them. There’s a civil war going on. There is a schizophrenia, as the psychologists or the psychiatrists would call it, going on within all of us. And there are times that all of us know somehow that there is a Mr. Hyde and a Dr. Jekyll in us. And we end up having to cry out with Ovid, the Latin poet, “I see and approve the better things of life, but the evil things I do.” We end up having to agree with Plato that the human personality is like a charioteer with two headstrong horses, wanting to go in different directions. Or sometimes we even have to end up crying out with Saint Augustine as he said in his Confessions, “Lord, make me pure, but not yet.” We end up crying out with the Apostle Paul, “The good that I would I do not: And the evil that I would not, that I do.” Or we end up having to say with Goethe that “there’s enough stuff in me to make both a gentleman and a rogue.” There’s a tension at the heart of human nature. And whenever we set out to dream our dreams and to build our temples, we must be honest enough to recognize it.
In the final analysis, God does not judge us by the separate incidents or the separate mistakes that we make, but by the total bent of our lives. In the final analysis, God knows that his children are weak and they are frail. In the final analysis, what God requires is that your heart is right.
And the question I want to raise with you: is your heart right? If your heart isn’t right, fix it up today; get God to fix it up. Get somebody to be able to say about you: “He may not have reached the highest height, he may not have realized all of his dreams, but he tried.” Isn’t that a wonderful thing for somebody to say about you? “He tried to be a good man. He tried to be a just man. He tried to be an honest man. His heart was in the right place.” And I can hear a voice saying, crying out through the eternities, “I accept you. You are a recipient of my grace because it was in your heart. And it is so well that it was within thine heart.”
I don’t know about you, but I can make a testimony. You don’t need to go out saying that Martin Luther King is a saint. Oh, no. I want you to know this morning that I’m a sinner like all of God’s children. But I want to be a good man. And I want to hear a voice saying to me one day, “I take you in and I bless you, because you tried. It is well that it was within thine heart.”
“I’ve been to the mountaintop”
And you know, if I were standing at the beginning of time with the possibility of taking a kind of general and panoramic view of the whole human history up to now, and the Almighty said to me, “Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?” I would take my mental flight by Egypt, and I would watch God’s children in their magnificent trek from the dark dungeons of Egypt across the Red Sea, through the wilderness, on toward the promised land. And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn’t stop there.
I would move on by Greece, and take my mind to Mount Olympus. And I would see Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides, and Aristophanes assembled around the Parthenon, and I would watch them around the Parthenon as they discussed the great and eternal issues of reality. But I wouldn’t stop there.
I would go on even to the great heyday of the Roman Empire and I would see developments around there, through various emperors and leaders. But I wouldn’t stop there.
I would even come up to the day of the Renaissance, and get a quick picture of all that the Renaissance did for the cultural and aesthetic life of man. But I wouldn’t stop there.
I would even go by the way that the man for whom I’m named had his habitat, and I would watch Martin Luther as he tacks his ninety-five theses on the door at the church in Wittenberg. But I wouldn’t stop there.
I would come on up even to 1863 and watch a vacillating President by the name of Abraham Lincoln finally come to the conclusion that he had to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. But I wouldn’t stop there.
I would even come up to the early thirties and see a man grappling with the problems of the bankruptcy of his nation, and come with an eloquent cry that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.” But I wouldn’t stop there.
Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty and say, “If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, I will be happy.”
Now that’s a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick; trouble is in the land, confusion all around. That’s a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century. Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee, the cry is always the same: “We want to be free.”
And another reason that I’m happy to live in this period is that we have been forced to a point where we are going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history. Survival demands that we grapple with them. Men for years now have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it’s nonviolence or nonexistence. That is where we are today.
And also in the human rights revolution, if something isn’t done, and done in a hurry, to bring the colored peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect, the whole world is doomed. Now, I’m just happy that God has allowed me to live in this period, to see what is unfolding. And I’m happy that he’s allowed me to be in Memphis.
I can remember, I can remember when Negroes were just going around, as Ralph has said so often, scratching where they didn’t itch and laughing when they were not tickled. But that day is all over. We mean business now and we are determined to gain our rightful place in God’s world. And that’s all this whole thing is about. We aren’t engaged in any negative protest and in any negative arguments with anybody. We are saying that we are determined to be men. We are determined to be people. We are saying, we are saying that we are God’s children. And if we are God’s children, we don’t have to live like we are forced to live.
Now, what does all of this mean in this great period of history? It means that we’ve got to stay together. We’ve got to stay together and maintain unity. You know, whenever Pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of slavery in Egypt, he had a favorite formula for doing it. What was that? He kept the slaves fighting among themselves. But whenever the slaves get together, something happens in Pharaoh’s court, and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery. When the slaves get together, that’s the beginning of getting out of slavery. Now let us maintain unity.
We aren’t going to let any mace stop us. We are masters in our nonviolent movement in disarming police forces; they don’t know what to do. I’ve seen them so often. I remember in Birmingham, Alabama, when we were in that majestic struggle there, we would move out of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church day after day. By the hundreds we would move out, and Bull Connor would tell them to send the dogs forth, and they did come. But we just went before the dogs singing, “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around.” Bull Connor next would say, “Turn the firehoses on.” And as I said to you the other night, Bull Connor didn’t know history. He knew a kind of physics that somehow didn’t relate to the transphysics that we knew about. And that was the fact that there was a certain kind of fire that no water could put out. And we went before the firehoses. We had known water. If we were Baptist or some other denomination, we had been immersed. If we were Methodist, and some others, we had been sprinkled—but we knew water. That couldn’t stop us.
And we just went on before the dogs, and we would look at them; and we’d go on before the water hoses, and we would look at them. And we’d just go on singing, “Over my head, I see freedom in the air.” And then we would be thrown in the paddy wagons, and sometimes we were stacked in there like sardines in a can. And they would throw us in, and old Bull would say, “Take ’em off.” And they did, and we would just go on in the paddy wagon singing, “We shall overcome.” And every now and then we’d get in jail, and we’d see the jailers looking through the windows being moved by our prayers and being moved by our words and our songs. And there was a power there which Bull Connor couldn’t adjust to, and so we ended up transforming Bull into a steer, and we won our struggle in Birmingham.
We’ve got to give ourselves to this struggle until the end. Nothing would be more tragic than to stop at this point in Memphis. We’ve got to see it through. When we have our march, you need to be there. If it means leaving work, if it means leaving school, be there. Be concerned about your brother. You may not be on strike, but either we go up together or we go down together. Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness.
One day a man came to Jesus and he wanted to raise some questions about some vital matters of life. At points he wanted to trick Jesus, and show him that he knew a little more than Jesus knew and throw him off base. Now that question could have easily ended up in a philosophical and theological debate. But Jesus immediately pulled that question from midair and placed it on a dangerous curve between Jerusalem and Jericho. And he talked about a certain man who fell among thieves. You remember that a Levite and a priest passed by on the other side—they didn’t stop to help him. Finally, a man of another race came by. He got down from his beast, decided not to be compassionate by proxy. But he got down with him, administered first aid, and helped the man in need. Jesus ended up saying this was the good man, this was the great man, because he had the capacity to project the “I” into the “thou,” and to be concerned about his brother.
Now you know, we use our imagination a great deal to try to determine why the priest and the Levite didn’t stop. At times we say they were busy going to a church meeting, an ecclesiastical gathering, and they had to get on down to Jerusalem so they wouldn’t be late for their meeting. At other times we would speculate that there was a religious law that one who was engaged in religious ceremonies was not to touch a human body twenty-four hours before the ceremony. And every now and then we begin to wonder whether maybe they were not going down to Jerusalem, or down to Jericho, rather, to organize a Jericho Road Improvement Association. That’s a possibility. Maybe they felt it was better to deal with the problem from the causal root, rather than to get bogged down with an individual effect.
But I’m going to tell you what my imagination tells me. It’s possible that those men were afraid. You see, the Jericho Road is a dangerous road. I remember when Mrs. King and I were first in Jerusalem. We rented a car and drove from Jerusalem down to Jericho. And as soon as we got on that road I said to my wife, “I can see why Jesus used this as a setting for his parable.” It’s a winding, meandering road. It’s really conducive for ambushing. You start out in Jerusalem, which is about twelve hundred miles, or rather, twelve hundred feet above sea level. And by the time you get down to Jericho, fifteen or twenty minutes later, you’re about twenty-two hundred feet below sea level. That’s a dangerous road. In the days of Jesus it came to be known as the “Bloody Pass.” And you know, it’s possible that the priest and the Levite looked over that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. Or it’s possible that they felt that the man on the ground was merely faking. And he was acting like he had been robbed and hurt, in order to seize them over there, lure them there for quick and easy seizure. And so the first question that the priest asked, the first question that the Levite asked was, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?”
But then the Good Samaritan came by, and he reversed the question: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”
That’s the question before you tonight. Not, “If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to my job?” Not, “If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week as a pastor?” The question is not, “If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?” The question is, “If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?” That’s the question.
Let us rise up tonight with a greater readiness. Let us stand with a greater determination. And let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge, to make America what it ought to be. We have an opportunity to make America a better nation. And I want to thank God, once more, for allowing me to be here with you.
You know, several years ago I was in New York City autographing the first book that I had written. And while sitting there autographing books, a demented black woman came up. The only question I heard from her was, “Are you Martin Luther King?” And I was looking down writing and I said, “Yes.”
And the next minute I felt something beating on my chest. Before I knew it I had been stabbed by this demented woman. I was rushed to Harlem Hospital. It was a dark Saturday afternoon. And that blade had gone through, and the X rays revealed that the tip of the blade was on the edge of my aorta, the main artery. And once that’s punctured, you drown in your own blood; that’s the end of you. It came out in the New York Times the next morning that if I had merely sneezed, I would have died.
Well, about four days later, they allowed me, after the operation, after my chest had been opened and the blade had been taken out, to move around in the wheelchair in the hospital. They allowed me to read some of the mail that came in, and from all over the states and the world kind letters came in. I read a few, but one of them I will never forget. I had received one from the President and the Vice President; I’ve forgotten what those telegrams said. I’d received a visit and a letter from the governor of New York, but I’ve forgotten what the letter said.
But there was another letter that came from a little girl, a young girl who was a student at the White Plains High School. And I looked at the letter and I’ll never forget it. It said simply, “Dear Dr. King: I am a ninth-grade student at the White Plains High School.” She said, “While it should not matter, I would like to mention that I’m a white girl. I read in the paper of your misfortune and of your suffering. And I read that if you had sneezed, you would have died. And I’m simply writing to you to say that I’m so happy that you didn’t sneeze.”
I want to say that I too am happy that I didn’t sneeze. Because if I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been around here in 1960, when students all over the South started sitting in at lunch counters. And I knew that as they were sitting in, they were really standing up for the best in the American Dream and taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
If I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been around here in 1961, when we decided to take a ride for freedom and ended segregation in interstate travel.
If I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been around here in 1962, when Negroes in Albany, Georgia, decided to straighten their backs up. And whenever men and women straighten their backs up, they are going somewhere, because a man can’t ride your back unless it is bent.
If I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been here in 1963, when the black people of Birmingham, Alabama, aroused the conscience of this nation and brought into being the Civil Rights Bill.
If I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have had a chance later that year, in August, to try to tell America about a dream that I had had.
If I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been down in Selma, Alabama, to see the great movement there.
If I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been in Memphis to see a community rally around those brothers and sisters who are suffering. I’m so happy that I didn’t sneeze.
I left Atlanta this morning, and as we got started on the plane—there were six of us—the pilot said over the public address system, “We are sorry for the delay, but we have Dr. Martin Luther King on the plane. And to be sure that all of the bags were checked and to be sure that nothing would be wrong on the plane, we had to check out everything carefully. And we’ve had the plane protected and guarded all night.”
And then I got into Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out, or what would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers.
Well, I don’t know what will happen now; we’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life—longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
“A drum major for righteousness”
Every now and then I guess we all think realistically about that day when we will be victimized with what is life’s final common denominator—that something we call death. We all think about it. And every now and then I think about my own death, and I think about my own funeral. And I don’t think of it in a morbid sense. Every now and then I ask myself, “What is it that I would want said?” And I leave the word to you this morning.
I’d like somebody to mention that day, that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to give his life serving others.
I’d like for somebody to say that day, that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to love somebody.
I want you to say that day, that I tried to be right on the war question.
I want you to be able to say that day, that I did try to feed the hungry.
And I want you to be able to say that day, that I did try, in my life, to clothe those who were naked.
I want you to say, on that day, that I did try, in my life, to visit those who were in prison.
I want you to say that I tried to love and to serve humanity.
Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter. I won’t have any money to leave behind. I won’t have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind. And that’s all I wanted to say.
If I can help somebody as I pass along, if I can cheer somebody with a word or song, if I can show somebody he’s traveling wrong, then my living will not be in vain. If I can do my duty as a Christian ought, if I can bring salvation to a world once wrought, if I can spread the message as the master taught, then my living will not be in vain.
EDITOR'S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. is an outgrowth of discussions involving myself and members of the King family. In 1992 I proposed to the family several ideas for increasing public understanding of King’s life and thought. As director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers Project, I was aware of the enormous quantity of documents that existed regarding King; yet I also knew that these documents were available mainly to scholars who were able to travel to archives. Although the King Project’s fourteen-volume edition of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. was intended as a way to make these documents more widely available, this long-term effort will not be completed for many years. Designed as an essential foundation for future studies of King and his times, the project’s annotated edition of King’s writings and public statements has more often attracted the attention of researchers rather than casual readers, and many of the important revelations that have resulted from the King Project’s research are not widely known outside the community of King scholars. Thus I urged the King family to join with me in developing innovative, popularly accessible ways to present the findings of the project.
The first result of these discussions was the development of a docudrama, Passages of Martin Luther King. With the assistance of Stanford drama professor Dr. Victor Leo Walker and Stanford undergraduate researcher Heather Williams, I explored ways of telling the story of King’s life through his own words and the words of those who knew him best. After several dramatic readings at Stanford, Passages was produced by the Stanford drama department in April 1993. Revised versions were presented as dramatic readings at Dartmouth College and the University of Washington in January 1996 and 1998, respectively. I am grateful for the contributions of all of the individuals who participated in these presentations, which increased my familiarity with the documentary resources concerning King and prepared a foundation for this comprehensive autobiographical account of King’s life.
Soon after Dexter King became the president and chief executive officer of the King Center in 1995, I found that we shared a common interest in facilitating the dissemination of King’s ideas through various media. In association with Philip Jones, president and CEO of Intellectual Properties Management (IPM) and the manager of the King literary estate, Mr. King established a partnership with Warner Books that will result in increasing public awareness of King’s ideas and achievements. I have greatly enjoyed the opportunity to work closely with Dexter and Philip to achieve our common goals, including the publication of this work. At every stage in the development of this work, their support and advice have been essential and available. Their energy and enthusiasm have been contagious.
My agent, Sandra Dijkstra, provided continuous encouragement for this project since its inception. Her expertise and that of her able staff made it possible for me to concentrate on research while they handled the financial and contractual matters. I especially appreciated the opportunity to work with a former student of mine, Rebecca Lowen, who is now with the Dijkstra Literary Agency.
Even before the book contract was signed, I became deeply involved in the task of searching for the source texts for the autobiography from the hundreds of thousands of King-related documents. My initial research assistant was Jennifer Marcus, a dedicated and talented researcher who helped produce the original prospectus for the autobiography and who remained involved in the project for most of her Stanford University undergraduate career.
Once I formally agreed to produce the autobiography in little more than a year, Randy Gellerman Mont-Reynaud became the principal researcher for the book. Randy examined thousands of documents and listened to hundreds of audio recordings to identify texts for possible inclusion and then assembled these texts in a preliminary chronological narrative. She brought to this difficult and daunting task considerable energy and enthusiasm—essential qualities for any effort of this scope.
The autobiography owes its completion to the extensive involvement of various members of the King Project staff. In particular, managing editor and archivist Susan Carson provided her unparalleled knowledge of the more than twenty thousand cataloged documents in the project’s database. During the final stages of manuscript preparation, she and researcher Erin Wood contributed valuable suggestions for revision, supervised the effort to locate appropriate additional documents, and checked the manuscript for accuracy.
Other King Project staff also made this book possible. I wish to thank especially Adrienne Clay, Kerry Taylor, and Elizabeth Baez who, despite the other demands of the project’s documentary edition, volunteered to read chapters and suggest necessary improvements. My assistant Vicki Brooks also contributed by proofreading chapters and by bringing a measure of organization to my office. Barbara Ifejika volunteered to help during the final stages of manuscript preparation.
Undergraduate and graduate student researchers have contributed to this work in a variety of ways. The following individuals have made significant contributions through the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research Fellowship summer internship program: Tenisha Armstrong (University of California, Santa Cruz), Brandi Brimmer (University of California, Los Angeles), Joy Clinkscales (American University), Andrew Davidson (Cornell University), Julian Davis (Brown University), Rashann Duvall (Yale University), Patrick Guarasci (Macalaster College), Lisa Marley (Brown University), and Maria-Theresa Robinson (Spelman College). Stanford students who worked on this volume include Stephanie Baca-Delancey, Joe Crespino, Elsa Cruz-Pearson, Nancy Farghalli, Hanan Hardy, Shaw-San Liu, Naila Moseley, Megan Thompkins, and Ali Zaidi.
I also appreciate the assistance of the following: Jeff Shram, Gail Westergard, and Christopher Carson.
Several others offered helpful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. My editor at Warner Books, Rick Horgan, gave useful and tactful suggestions at various stages of manuscript preparation. I appreciate and benefited from the constructive criticisms of Candace Falk of the University of California, Berkeley, and of Michael Honey of the University of Washington, Tacoma. I am especially grateful for Coretta Scott King’s willingness to read this manuscript with the painstaking care and sensitive understanding that only she could provide.
Finally, I appreciate the remarkable fact that Martin Luther King, Jr., had the foresight to create and leave behind the autobiographical documents on which this book is based.
SOURCE NOTES
Abbreviations of Collections and Repositories:
|
ABSP, DHU
|
Arthur B. Spingarn Papers, Howard University, Washington, D.C.
|
|
AC, InU-N
|
Audiotape Collection, Indiana University, Northwest Regional Campus, Gary, Indiana
|
|
ACA-ARC, LNT
|
American Committee on Africa Papers, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana
|
|
AFSCR, AFSCA
|
American Friends Service Committee Records, AFSC Archives, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
|
|
CB, CtY
|
Chester Bowles Collection, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
|
|
CSKC, INP
|
Coretta Scott King Collection (in private hands)
|
|
DABCC, INP
|
Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church Collection (in private hands)
|
|
DCST, AB
|
Dallas County Sheriff’s Department Surveillance Tape, Birmingham Public Library, Birminghan, Alabama
|
|
DHSTR, WHi
|
Donald H. Smith Tape Recordings, State Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin
|
|
DJG, INP
|
David J. Garrow Collection (in private hands)
|
|
EMBC, INP
|
Etta Moten Barnett Collection (in private hands)
|
|
HG, GAMK
|
Hazel Gregory Papers, Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Change, Inc., Atlanta, Georgia
|
|
JFKP, MWalk
|
John F. Kennedy Miscellaneous Papers, John F. Kennedy Library, Waltham, Massachusetts
|
|
JWWP, DHU
|
Julius Waties Waring Papers, Howard University, Washington, D.C.
|
|
MLKP, MBU
|
Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers, 1954–1968, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts
|
|
MLKEC, INP
|
Martin Luther King Estate Collection (in private hands)
|
|
MLKJP, GAMK
|
Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers, 1954–1968, King Center, Atlanta, Georgia
|
|
MMFR, INP
|
Montgomery to Memphis Film Research Files (in private hands)
|
|
MVC, TMM
|
Mississippi Valley Collection, Memphis State University, Memphis, Tennessee
|
|
NAACPP, DLC
|
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
|
|
NBCC, NNNBC
|
National Broadcasting Company, Inc., Collection, NBC Library, New York, New York
|
|
NF, GEU
|
Newsweek File, Emory University Special Collections, Atlanta, Georgia
|
|
OGCP, MBU
|
Office of General Council Papers, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts
|
|
PHBC, INP
|
Paul H. Brown Collection (in private hands)
|
|
SAVFC, WHi
|
Social Action Vertical File, State Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin
|
|
SCLCT, INP
|
Southern Christian Leadership Conference Tapes (in private hands)
|
|
TWUC, NNU-T
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Transport Workers Union Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University, New York, New York
|
|
UPWP, WHi
|
United Packinghouse Workers Union Papers, State Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin
|
|
WAR, INP
|
William A. Robinson Miscellaneous Papers (in private hands)
|
1. EARLY YEARS
PRINCIPAL SOURCES:
“An Autobiography of Religious Development,” November 1950, in Clayborne Carson, Ralph E. Luker, and Penny A. Russell, eds., The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Volume I: Called to Serve, January 1929–June 1951 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 359–363.
Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (New York: Harper and Row, 1958), chapter 1; “Family in Siege,” drafts for Stride Toward Freedom (MLKP, MBU).
OTHER SOURCES:
“Facing the Challenge of the New Age,” address at NAACP Emancipation Day Rally, Atlanta, January 1, 1957 (PHBC, INP).
“Why Jesus Called a Man a Fool,” sermon at Mount Pisgah Missionary Baptist Church, Chicago, August 27, 1967, in Clayborne Carson and Peter Holloran, eds., A Knock at Midnight: Inspiration from the Great Sermons of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: IPM/Warner Books, 1998), pp. 145–164.
Interview with Edward T. Ladd on Profile, WAII-TV, at Emory University, Atlanta, April 12, 1964 (MLKEC, INP).
Interview with John Freeman on BBC’s Face to Face, London, England, October 24, 1961 (MLKJP, GAMK).
Interview with Alex Haley, Playboy 12 (January 1965): 65–68, 70–74, 76–78.
Statement on Meredith March, Grenada, Mississippi, June 16, 1966 (MLKJP, GAMK).
Quoted in Ted Poston, “Fighting Pastor,” New York Post, April 10, 1957.
“The Negro and the Constitution,” May 1944, Papers I, pp. 110–111.
Letters to Alberta Williams King, June 11 and 18, 1944; Martin Luther King, Sr., June 15, 1944, Papers I, pp. 112–116.
2. MOREHOUSE COLLEGE
PRINCIPAL SOURCE:
“An Autobiography of Religious Development.”
OTHER SOURCES:
Stride Toward Freedom, pp. 91, 145.
“A Legacy of Creative Protest,” in Massachusetts Review 4 (September 1962): 43.
“Martin Luther King Explains Nonviolent Resistance,” in William Katz, The Negro in American History (New York: Pitman, 1967), pp. 511–513.
“May 17—11 Years Later,” New York Amsterdam News, May 22, 1965.
Interview with Edward T. Ladd.
Interview with John Freeman.
Quoted in Ted Poston, “Fighting Pastor” and “The Boycott and the ‘New Dawn,’ ” New York Post, May 13, 1956.
Quoted in William Peters, “ ‘Our Weapon Is Love,’ ” Redbook 107 (August 1956): 42–43, 71–73.
Quoted in L. D. Reddick, Crusader Without Violence (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959), p. 74.
“Kick Up Dust,” Letter to Editor, Atlanta Constitution, August 6, 1946, Papers I, p. 121.
3. CROZER SEMINARY
PRINCIPAL SOURCES:
Stride Toward Freedom, chapter 6.
“Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” Christian Century 77 (April 13, 1960): 439–441; “How my mind has changed,” draft of Christian Century article (MLKP, MBU).
Strength to Love (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), chapter 17.
OTHER SOURCES:
“Autobiography of Religious Development.”
“Preaching Ministry,” 1949(?), course paper submitted at Crozer Theological Seminary, Chester, Pennsylvania (CSKC, INP).
“How Modern Christians Should Think of Man,” 1949–50, Papers I, pp. 273–279.
“His Influence Speaks to World Conscience,” Hindustan Times, January 30, 1958.
“The Theology of Reinhold Niebuhr,” 1954(?), in Clayborne Carson, Ralph E. Luker, Penny A. Russell, and Peter Holloran, eds., The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Volume II: Rediscovering Precious Values, July 1951–November 1955 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 269–279.
Fragment of Application to Boston University, December 1950(?), Papers I, p. 390.
Letter to Sankey L. Blanton, January 1951, Papers I, p. 391.
Letter to Alberta Williams King, October 1948, Papers I, p. 161.
Quoted in Peters, “ ‘Our Weapon Is Love.’ ”
“The Significant Contributions of Jeremiah to Religious Thought,” November 1948, Papers I, pp. 181–194.
“A Conception and Impression of Religion Drawn from Dr. Edgar S. Brightman’s Book Entitled ‘A Philosophy of Religion,’ ” March 28, 1951, Papers I, pp. 407–416.
4. BOSTON UNIVERSITY
PRINCIPAL SOURCE:
Stride Toward Freedom, chapter 6.
OTHER SOURCES:
“Rediscovering Lost Values,” sermon at Second Baptist Church, Detroit, Michigan, February 28, 1954, Papers II, pp. 248–256.
Press conference on donation of papers to Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, September 11, 1964 (OGCP, MBU).
Letter to George W. Davis, December 1, 1953, Papers II, pp. 223–224.
Abstract of “A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman,” April 15, 1955, Papers II, pp. 545–548.
“Memories of Housing Bias in Boston,” Boston Globe, April 23, 1965.
5. CORETTA
PRINCIPAL SOURCES:
Stride Toward Freedom, chapter 1, and “Family in siege,” unpublished draft.
Coretta Scott King, My Life with Martin (New York: Henry Holt, 1969, rev. 1993), chapter 3.
Interview with Edward T. Ladd.
Interview with Arnold Michaelis, Martin Luther King; Jr.: A Personal Portrait (videotape), December 1966 (MLKEC, INP).
OTHER SOURCES:
“Remarks in Acceptance of the NAACP Spingarn Medal,” Detroit, Michigan, June 28, 1957 (ABSP, DHU).
Interview with Martin Agronsky, NBC’s Look Here, Montgomery, October 27, 1957 (NBCC, NNNBC).
Interview with John Freeman.
Quoted in Poston, “Fighting Pastor.”
Letter to Coretta Scott King, Atlanta, July 18, 1952; and letter to Coretta Scott King, Boston, July 23, 1954 (CSKC, INP).
6. DEXTER AVENUE BAPTIST CHURCH
PRINCIPAL SOURCE:
Stride Toward Freedom, chapters 1, and 2; and “Montgomery Before the Protest,” unpublished draft of Stride Toward Freedom (MLKP, MBU).
OTHER SOURCES:
“Recommendations to the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church for the Fiscal Year 1954–55,” September 5, 1954, Papers II, pp. 287–294.
Address to Dexter Avenue Baptist Church Congregation, Montgomery, May 2, 1954 (CSKC, INP).
“The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life,” sermon at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, January 24, 1954 (CSKC, INP).
“Looking Beyond Your Circumstances,” sermon at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, September 18, 1955 (CSKC, INP).
Letter to Francis E. Stewart, July 26, 1954, Papers II, pp. 280–281.
Letter to Walter R. McCall, October 19, 1954, Papers II, pp. 301–302.
Letter to Ebenezer Baptist Church Members, November 6, 1954, Papers II, pp. 313–314.
Letter to Howard Thurman, October 31, 1955, Papers II, pp. 583–584.
Letter to John Thomas Porter, November 18, 1955, Papers II, p. 590.
Letter to L. Harold DeWolf, January 4, 1957 (MLKP, MBU).
Letter to Edward H. Whitaker, November 30, 1955, Papers II, p. 593.
Quoted in Poston, “The Boycott and the New Dawn.”
Quoted in “My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr.,” interview with Coretta Scott King, SCLC radio program, December 1969 (SCLCT, INP).
7. MONTGOMERY MOVEMENT BEGINS
PRINCIPAL SOURCES:
Stride Toward Freedom, chapters 1 and 2; and “The Decisive Arrest,” unpublished draft of Stride Toward Freedom, May 1958 (MLKP, MBU).
“The Montgomery Story,” address at Forty-seventh Annual NAACP Convention, San Francisco, California, June 27, 1956, in Clayborne Carson, Stewart Burns, Susan Carson, Peter Holloran, and Dana L. H. Powell, eds., The Papers of Martin Luther King, Ir., Volume III: Birth of a New Age, December 1955–December 1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 299–310.
OTHER SOURCES:
Address at Montgomery Improvement Association Mass Meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church, December 5, 1955, Papers III, pp. 71–79.
“Facing the Challenge of a New Age,” address at First Institute for Nonviolence and Social Change, Atlanta, December 3, 1956, Papers III, pp. 451–463.
Quoted in Poston, “Fighting Pastor.”
8. THE VIOLENCE OF DESPERATE MEN
PRINCIPAL SOURCE:
Stride Toward Freedom, chapters 5, 7, and 8; and “Family in Siege,” draft.
OTHER SOURCES:
“Walk for Freedom,” May 1956, Papers III, pp. 277–280.
“Why Jesus Called a Man a Fool.”
“A Testament of Hope,” Playboy 16 (January 1969): 175.
“Nonviolence: The Only Road to Freedom,” Ebony 21 (October 1966): pp. 27–30.
Notes on MIA Executive Board Meeting, by Donald T. Ferron, January 30, 1956; and notes on MIA Mass Meeting at First Baptist Church, by Willie Mae Lee, January 30, 1956, Papers III, pp. 109–112, 113–114.
Interview with Martin Agronsky.
Quoted in Joe Azbell, “Blast Rocks Residence of Bus Boycott Leader,” Montgomery Advertiser, Montgomery, January 31, 1956, Papers III, pp. 114–115.
Quoted in Wayne Phillips, “Negroes Pledge to Keep Boycott,” New York Times, February 24, 1956. Papers III, pp. 135–136.
9. DESEGREGATION AT LAST
PRINCIPAL SOURCE:
Stride Toward Freedom, chapters 8 and 9; “Family in Siege,” unpublished draft; and “The Violence of Desperate Men,” unpublished draft (MLKP-MBU).
OTHER SOURCES:
Statement on ending the bus boycott, Montgomery, December 20, 1956, Papers III, pp. 485–487.
“Montgomery Sparked a Revolution,” Southern Courier, December 11–12, 1965.
Reactions to Conviction, Papers III, pp. 198–199.
“A Knock at Midnight,” in Strength to Love, chapter 6.
“The Montgomery Story.”
Letter to Lillian Eugenia Smith, May 24, 1956, Papers III, pp. 273–274.
Letter to Sylvester S. Robinson, October 3, 1956, Papers III, pp. 391–393.
Interview with Joe Azbell, Montgomery, March 23, 1956, Papers III, pp. 202–203.
“Desegregation and the Future,” address at annual luncheon of National Committee for Rural Schools, New York, December 15, 1956, Papers III, pp. 472–473.
Quoted in L. D. Reddick, Crusader Without Violence.
10. THE EXPANDING STRUGGLE
PRINCIPAL SOURCE:
Stride Toward Freedom, chapters 9–11.
OTHER SOURCES:
“Conquering Self-Centeredness,” sermon at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, August 11, 1957 (MLKJP, GAMK).
“The Future of Integration,” address to the United Packinghouse Workers of America, AFL-CIO, Chicago, October 2, 1957 (UPWP, WHi).
“Facing the Challenge of a New Age,” December 3, 1956.
“Facing the Challenge of a New Age,” January 1, 1957.
“Give Us the Ballot,” address at the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, Washington, D.C., May 17, 1957 (MLKJP, GAMK).
“South-Wide Conference to Draft Final Plans for a Voting Rights Campaign,” press release, Montgomery, October 30, 1957 (UPWP, WHi).
Letter to O. Clay Maxwell, November 20, 1958 (MLKP, MBU).
Letter to Frank J. Gregory, May 7, 1957 (MLKJP, GAMK).
Letter to Dwight D. Eisenhower, November 5, 1957 (NAACPP, DLC).
Letter to Fannie E. Scott, January 28, 1957 (MLKP, MBU).
Telegram to Coretta Scott King, New Orleans, February 14, 1957 (CSKC, INP).
Interview with Mike Wallace, “Does Desegregation Equal Integration?” New York Post, July 11, 1958.
Interview with Mike Wallace, “Self-Portrait of a Symbol: Martin Luther King,” New York Post, February 15, 1961.
Interview with Martin Agronsky.
“The Consequences of Fame,” New York Post, April 14, 1957.
Quoted in Poston, “Where Does He Go from Here?” New York Post, April 14, 1957.
11. BIRTH OF A NEW NATION
PRINCIPAL SOURCES:
“The Birth of a New Nation,” sermon at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, April 7, 1957 (MLKEC, INP).
Interview with Etta Moten Barnett, Accra, Ghana, March 6, 1957 (EMBC, INP).
OTHER SOURCES:
“Concerning Southern Civil Rights,” address at Mississippi Freedom Party rally, Jackson, Mississippi, July 25, 1964 (MMFR, INP).
Why We Can’t Wait (New York: New American Library, 1964), p. 21.
Annual Report, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, November 1, 1956–October 31, 1957 (DABCC, INP).
12. BRUSH WITH DEATH
PRINCIPAL SOURCES:
Why We Can’t Wait, p. 17
“I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” address at the Bishop Charles J. Mason Temple, Memphis, Tennessee, April 3, 1968 (MLKJP, GAMK).
“Advice for Living,” Ebony 14 (December, 1958): 159.
OTHER SOURCES:
Annual Report, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, November 1, 1957–November 30, 1958 (DABCC, INP).
Letter to the mass meeting of the Montgomery Improvement Association, October 6, 1958 (HG, GAMK).
Interview on assassination attempt by Izola Curry, New York, September 30, 1958 (MMFR, INP).
Statement issued from Harlem Hospital, New York, September 30, 1958 (MLKP, MBU).
Statement upon return to Montgomery, Montgomery, October 24, 1958 (MLKJP, GAMK).
13. PILGRIMAGE TO NONVIOLENCE
PRINCIPAL SOURCES:
“My Trip to the Land of Gandhi,” Ebony 20 (July 1959): 84–86.
“Sermon on Mahatma Gandhi,” at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, March 22, 1959 (MLKJP, GAMK).
“A Walk Through the Holy Land,” at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, March 29, 1959 (MLKJP, GAMK).
“The Death of Evil upon the Seashore,” in Strength to Love, chapter 8.
OTHER SOURCES:
“Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” sermon at National Cathedral, Washington, D.C., March 31, 1968 (MLKJP, GAMK).
“The American Dream,” address at Lincoln University, Pennsylvania, June 6, 1961 (MLKP, MBU).
“The American Dream,” sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, July 4, 1965 (MLKEC, INP).
“Equality Now: The President Has the Power,” Nation 192 (February 4, 1961): 91–95.
Statement on leaving India, New Delhi, March 9, 1959 (MLKP, MBU).
Quoted in the Tour Diary of James Bristol, March 10, 1959 (AFSCR, AFSCA).
“Pilgrimage to Nonviolence.”
Letter to G. Ramachandran, May 19, 1959 (MLKP, MBU).
Why We Can’t Wait, p. 135.
14. THE SIT-IN MOVEMENT
PRINCIPAL SOURCES:
“The Burning Truth in the South,” Progressive 24 (May 1960): 8–10.
Annual Address on the Fourth Anniversary of the Montgomery Improvement Association, December 3, 1959 (MLKJP, GAMK).
“Foreword,” in William Kunstler, ed., Deep in My Heart (New York: William Morrow, 1966), pp. 21–26.
OTHER SOURCES:
“The Time for Freedom Has Come,” New York Times Magazine, September 10, 1961. Copyright © 1961 by the New York Times Co. Reprinted by permission.
“A Creative Protest,” address in Durham, North Carolina, February 16, 1960 (DJG, INP).
Why We Can’t Wait, chapter 2.
Statement at Youth March for Integrated Schools, Washington, D.C., April 18, 1959 (MLKJP, GAMK).
Statement to press at beginning of the Youth Leadership Conference, Raleigh, North Carolina, April 15, 1960 (MLKP, MBU).
Farewell Message to Dexter Avenue Baptist Church Congregation, November 29, 1959 (MLKJP, GAMK).
Letter to Allan Knight Chalmers, April 18, 1960 (MLKP, MBU).
Letter to James W. Shaeffer, December 4, 1959 (MLKP, MBU).
Form letter to supporters, June 1960 (MLKP, MBU).
Letter to William Herbert Gray, April 6, 1960 (MLKP, MBU).
Quoted in “King Accepts Atlanta Job; Leaving City,” Montgomery Advertiser, November 30, 1959.
15. ATLANTA ARREST AND PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS
PRINCIPAL SOURCE:
Interview with Berl I. Bernhard for John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Atlanta, March 9, 1964 (MLKJP, GAMK).
OTHER SOURCES:
Why We Can’t Wait, p. 147.
Why We Chose Jail, Not Bail: Statement to judge after the arrests at Rich’s, Atlanta, October 19, 1960 (CSKC, INP).
“Out on Bond,” Atlanta Journal, October 28, 1960.
Letter to Irl G. Whitchurch, August 6, 1959 (MLKP, MBU).
Letter to Chester Bowles, June 24, 1960 (CB, CtY).
Letter to Mrs. Frank Skeller, January 30, 1961 (MLKP, MBU).
Quoted in Andrew Young, An Easy Burden (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), p. 175.
16. THE ALBANY MOVEMENT
PRINCIPAL SOURCES:
Diary in Albany Jail, July 10–11, July 27–August 10, 1962 (CSKC, INP).
“Why It’s Albany,” New York Amsterdam News, August 18, 1962.
“Fumbling on the New Frontier,” Nation, 194 (March 3, 1962): 190–193.
“Albany, Georgia—Tensions of the South,” draft of article for New York Times Magazine, August 20, 1962 (MLKJP, GAMK).
Why We Can’t Wait, chapters 1 and 2.
Address to District 65-AFL-CIO at Laurels Country Club, Monticello, New York, September 8, 1962 (MLKJP, GAMK).
OTHER SOURCES:
Letter to Earl Mazo, September 2, 1958 (MLKP, MBU).
Form letter to supporters, December 19, 1961 (JWWP, DHU).
“America’s Great Crisis,” address to Transport Workers Union Convention, New York, October 5, 1961 (TWUC, NNU-T).
“Solid Wall of Segregation Cracks at Albany,” SCLC Newsletter, March, 1963 (MLKJP, GAMK).
Quoted in Vic Smith, “Peace Prevails,” Albany Herald, December 18, 1961.
“Turning Point of Civil Rights,” New York Amsterdam News, February 3, 1962.
“A Message from Jail,” New York Amsterdam News, July 14, 1962.
“The Case against Tokenism,” New York Times Magazine, August 5, 1962. Copyright © 1962 by the New York Times Co. Reprinted by permission.
“Terrible Cost of the Ballot,” New York Amsterdam News, September 1, 1962 (MLKJP, GAMK).
Statement on release from jail, Albany, Georgia, July 13, 1962 (MLKJP, GAMK).
Address and responses to questions at National Press Club, Washington, D.C., July 19, 1962 (MLKP, MBU).
Statement on Violence in Albany, with W. G. Anderson, July 25, 1962 (CSKC, INP).
Telegram to John F. Kennedy, August 2, 1962 (JFKP, MWalK).
Telegram to John F. Kennedy, September 11, 1962 (JFKP, MWalK).
Interview with Alex Haley.
Quoted in Time, January 3, 1964, p. 15.
“Interview, Man of the Year,” Time 83 (January 3, 1964): 13–16, 25–27.
17. THE BIRMINGHAM CAMPAIGN
PRINCIPAL SOURCE:
Why We Can’t Wait, chapters 3 and 4; and draft of Why We Can’t Wait (MLKP, MBU).
OTHER SOURCES:
Statement on Injunction, April 11, 1963, in Alan F. Westin and Barry Mahoney, The Trial of Martin Luther King (New York: Crowell, 1974), p. 79.
“Most Abused Man in Nation,” New York Amsterdam News, March 31, 1962.
Address at Mass Meeting at St. Luke’s Baptist Church, Birmingham, May 5, 1963 (MLKJP, GAMK).
Address at Mass Meeting, Yazoo City, Mississippi, June 21, 1966 (MLKJP, GAMK).
Telegram to John F. Kennedy, April 16, 1963 (JFKP, MWalK).
18. LETTER FROM BIRMINGHAM JAIL
PRINCIPAL SOURCE:
Why We Can’t Wait, chapter 5.
OTHER SOURCES:
Address and press conference at St. John Baptist Church, Gary, Indiana, July 1, 1966 (AC, InU-N).
19. FREEDOM NOW!
PRINCIPAL SOURCE:
Why We Can’t Wait, chapter 6.
OTHER SOURCES:
Statement at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Birmingham, May 3, 1963 (DCST, AB).
Statement at Mass Meeting at St. Luke’s Baptist Church.
Statement at Mass Meeting, Birmingham, May 10, 1963 (MLKEC, INP).
“What a Mother Should Tell Her Child,” sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, May 12, 1963 (MLKJP, GAMK).
Interview with Kenneth B. Clark, in King, Malcolm, Baldwin: Three Interviews by Kenneth B. Clark (Middletown, Connecticut, 1963), p. 27.
Interview with Alex Haley.
Press Conference USA, videotaped interview, Washington, D. C., July 5, 1963 (DJG, INP).
20. MARCH ON WASHINGTON
PRINCIPAL SOURCES:
Why We Can’t Wait, chapter 7; and “A Summer of Discontent,” draft for Why We Can’t Wait, September 1963 (MLKP, MBU).
Address at March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Washington, D.C., August 28, 1963 (SCLCT, INP).
OTHER SOURCES:
Interview with Donald H. Smith, Altanta, November 29, 1963 (DHSTR, WHi).
Affidavit, Martin Luther King, Jr., vs. Mister Maestro, Inc. and Twentieth Century Fox Record Corporation, U.S. District Court, S.D. of New York, December 16, 1963 (MLKEC, INP).
21. DEATH OF ILLUSIONS
PRINCIPAL SOURCES:
Why We Can’t Wait, chapter 8.
“Epitaph and Challenge,” SCLC Newsletter, November–December 1963.
“Eulogy for the Martyred Children,” Birmingham, September 18, 1963 (MLKJP, GAMK).
Meeting with John F. Kennedy and civil rights leaders, audio recording, Washington, D.C., September 19, 1963 (JFKP, MWalK).
OTHER SOURCES:
Annual Address to Seventh Annual Convention of SCLC, Virginia Union, Richmond, September 27, 1963 (MLKJP, GAMK).
Interview with Alex Haley.
Address on Three of the Children Killed at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Birmingham, September 18, 1963 (MLKP, MBU).
Handwritten Notes on John F. Kennedy assassination, November 1963 (MLKJP, GAMK).
“What Killed JFK?” New York Amsterdam News, December 21, 1963.
Christmas letter to the Family of Denise McNair, December 1963 (MLKJP, GAMK).
22. ST. AUGUSTINE
PRINCIPAL SOURCES:
Why We Can’t Wait, chapter 8.
“Let Justice Roll Down,” Nation 200 (March 15, 1965): 269–274. Copyright © 1965. Reprinted by permission.
“St. Augustine Florida, 400 Years of Bigotry and Hate,” SCLC Newsletter, June 1964.
Statement on St. Augustine, Atlanta, June 17, 1964 (MLKJP, GAMK).
Annual Address to Eighth Annual Convention of SCLC, Savannah, Georgia, October 1, 1964 (SAVFC, WHi).
Passage of 1964 Civil Rights Act, Atlanta, July 2, 1964 (MLKJP, GAMK).
OTHER SOURCES:
“Hammer of Civil Rights,” Nation 198 (March 9, 1964): 230–234.
Statement on Goldwater and St. Augustine, ABC interview, St. Augustine, Florida, July 16, 1964 (MLKJP, GAMK).
“Quest for Peace and Justice,” Nobel Prize Lecture at University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway, December 11, 1964 (MLKJP, GAMK).
23. THE MISSISSIPPI CHALLENGE
PRINCIPAL SOURCES:
Statement in support of Freedom Democratic Party, Jackson, Mississippi, July 22, 1964 (MLKJP, GAMK).
Annual Address to Eighth Annual Convention of SCLC.
Address to Southern Association of Political Scientists, November 13, 1964 (MLKJP, GAMK).
“Ready in Mississippi,” New York Amsterdam News, August 29, 1964.
“Pathos and Hope,” New York Amsterdam News, March 3, 1962.
“People to People,” New York Amsterdam News, September 1964.
OTHER SOURCES:
“Passage of 1964 Civil Rights Act,” July 2, 1964.
Statement before the Credentials Committee, Democratic National Committee, Atlantic City, New Jersey, August 22, 1964 (MLKJP, GAMK).
24. THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE
PRINCIPAL SOURCES:
“Mighty Army of Love,” New York Amsterdam News, November 7, 1964.
“What the Nobel Prize Means to Me,” New York Amsterdam News, November 28, 1964.
Acceptance Address at Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony, Oslo, Norway, December 10, 1964 (MLKJP, GAMK).
Statement Concerning Nobel Prize Money, Oslo, Norway, December 17, 1964 (MLKJP, GAMK).
“Dreams of Brighter Tomorrows,” Ebony 20 (March 1965): 43.
OTHER SOURCES:
“Quest for Peace and Justice.”
Address on South African Independence, London, England, December 7, 1964 (ACA-ARC, LNT).
Statement on the Nobel Peace Prize, Forneby, Norway, December 9, 1964 (MLKJP, GAMK).
Address upon Acceptance of the New York City Medallion, New York, December 17, 1964 (MLKJP, GAMK).
“The Nobel Prize,” Liberation (January 1965): 28–29.
“Struggle for Racial Justice,” address at Recognition Dinner, Atlanta, January 27, 1965 (NF, GEU).
“After the Nobel Ceremony, A Tender Moment Is Shared,” Ebony 20 (March 1965): 38.
25. MALCOLM X
PRINCIPAL SOURCES:
Interview with Alex Haley.
“The Nightmare of Violence,” New York Amsterdam News, February 25, 1965.
Press conference on the Death of Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam and Violence, Los Angeles, February 24, 1965 (MLKJP, GAMK).
OTHER SOURCES:
Telegram to Betty Shabazz, February 26, 1965 (MLKJP, GAMK).
Letter to Edward D. Ball, December 14, 1961 (MLKP, MBU).
Transcript, Testimony in Williams v. Wallace, March 11, 1965 (MLKJP, GAMK).
Interview with Robert Penn Warren, in Who Speaks for the Negro?, Robert Penn Warren, ed. (New York: Random House, 1965), pp. 203–221.
26. SELMA
PRINCIPAL SOURCES:
“Movement to Washington,” Address at SCLC’s Ministers Leadership Training Program, Miami, February 23, 1968 (MLKEC, INP).
“Selma—The Shame and the Promise,” Industrial Unions Department Agenda 1 (March 1965): 18–21.
“Civil Rights No. 1—The Right to Vote,” New York Times Magazine, March 14, 1965, p. 26. Copyright © 1965 by the New York Times Co. Reprinted by permission.
Transcript, Testimony in Williams v. Wallace.
Meeting scheduled with Hubert Humphrey, press release, Washington, D.C., February 7, 1965 (MLKJP, GAMK).
“Behind the Selma March,” Saturday Review 48 (April 3, 1965): 16–17.
“After the March—An Open Letter to the American People,” Atlanta, April 1, 1965 (MLKJP, GAMK).
Annual Address to Ninth Annual Convention of SCLC, Birmingham, Alabama, August 11, 1965 (MLKJP, GAMK).
OTHER SOURCES:
Address to rally prior to Selma March, Selma, Alabama, February 1, 1965 (MLKJP, GAMK).
“A Letter from Selma: Martin Luther King from a Selma, Alabama Jail,” New York Times, February 5, 1965. Copyright © 1965 by the New York Times Co. Reprinted by permission.
Instructions from Selma Jail to movement associates, February 1965 (MLKJP, GAMK).
“Let Justice Roll Down,” The Nation, March 15, 1965
Statement on brutal beating of three white ministers, March 10, 1965 (MLKJP, GAMK).
Handwritten draft of statement regarding death of James Reeb, March 11, 1965 (MLKJP, GAMK).
Statement announcing judge’s permission to stage march to Selma, Montgomery, March 16, 1965 (MLKJP, GAMK).
Statement regarding the address made by Lyndon Baines Johnson on the situation in Selma, March 16, 1965 (MLKJP, GAMK).
Interview in Selma, Alabama, March 24, 1965 (MMFR, INP).
Address at St. Jude’s, Montgomery, March 24, 1965 (MLKJP, GAMK).
Address at Selma to Montgomery March, March 25, 1965 (MLKJP, GAMK).
Address and Press Conference at St. John Baptist Church, Gary, Indiana, July 1, 1966.
Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), pp. 1–2.
Form letter to supporters, June, 1965 (WAR, INP).
27. WATTS
PRINCIPAL SOURCES:
“A Cry of Hate or a Cry for Help?” Special to the New York Times Magazine draft (MLKJP, GAMK).
Statement on arrival in Los Angeles, August 17, 1965 (MLKJP, GAMK).
“Feeling Alone in the Struggle,” New York Amsterdam News, August 28, 1965.
OTHER SOURCES:
“A Christian Movement in a Revolutionary Age,” Rochester, New York, September 28, 1965 (CSKC, INP).
“Beyond the Los Angeles Riots, Next Stop: The North,” Saturday Review 48 (November 13, 1965): 33–35.
“The Crisis in Civil Rights,” Chicago, July 1967 (MLKJP, GAMK).
28. CHICAGO CAMPAIGN
PRINCIPAL SOURCES:
“Why Chicago Is the Target,” New York Amsterdam News, September 11, 1965.
Where Do We Go from Here.
“The Good Samaritan,” sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, August 28, 1966 (MLKJP, GAMK).
“One Year Later in Chicago,” handwritten draft, February 1967 (SCLCR, GAMK).
Quoted in Federal Role in Urban Affairs Hearings, testimony before Subcommittee on Executive Reorganization, Committe on Government Operations, U.S. Senate, December 15, 1966.
OTHER SOURCES:
Statement to the press, Chicago, July 7, 1965 (MLKJP, GAMK).
The Chicago Plan, press release, Atlanta, January 7, 1966 (MLKJP, GAMK).
Address to Freedom Rally at Soldiers Field, Chicago, July 10, 1966 (MLKJP, GAMK).
Statement on West Side Riots, Chicago, July 17, 1966 (MLKJP, GAMK).
“Why I Must March,” address, Chicago, August 18, 1966 (MLKEC, INP).
Statement on nonviolence, Grenada, Mississippi, September 19, 1966 (MLKJP, GAMK).
“A Gift of Love,” McCalls 94 (December 1966): 146–147.
Keynote address, National Conference for New Politics, Chicago, August 31, 1967 (MLKJP, GAMK).
Press conference, Liberty Baptist Church, Chicago, March 24, 1967 (MLKJP, GAMK).
“What Are Your New Year’s Resolutions?” sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, January 7, 1968 (MLKJP, GAMK).
Interview with Merv Griffin, on Merv Griffin Show, July 6, 1967 (MLKEC, INP).
“Conversation with Martin Luther King,” in James M. Washington, ed., Testament of Hope (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986; 1991 ed.), pp. 657–679.
Quoted in Flip Schulke, King Remembered.
29. BLACK POWER
PRINCIPAL SOURCE:
Where Do We Go from Here, chapter 2.
OTHER SOURCES:
Address during Meredith March, West Marks, Mississippi, June 12, 1966 (MLKJP, GAMK).
Address at mass meeting, Yazoo City, Mississippi, June 21, 1966 (MLKJP, GAMK).
“It Is Not Enough to Condemn Black Power,” signed advertisement in New York Times, July 26, 1966.
Statement on Black Political Power, Grenada, Mississippi, June 16, 1966 (MLKJP, GAMK).
“Conversation with Martin Luther King.”
30. BEYOND VIETNAM
PRINCIPAL SOURCES:
“Journey of Conscience,” draft of address, 1967 (CSKC, INP).
“Beyond Vietnam,” address at Riverside Church, New York City, April 4, 1967 (MLKJP, GAMK).
Press conference in Los Angeles, April 12, 1967 (DJG, INP).
“To Chart Our Course of the Future,” Address at SCLC staff retreat at Penn Center, Frogmore, South Carolina, May 22, 1967 (MLKJP, GAMK).
Address at SCLC’s Ministers Leadership Training Program.
OTHER SOURCES:
“My Dream—Peace: God’s Man’s Business,” New York Amsterdam News, January 1, 1966.
Press conference, Los Angeles, California, April 12, 1967.
“Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam,” sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, April 30, 1967 (MLKJP, GAMK).
“To Serve the Present Age,” sermon at Victory Baptist Church, Los Angeles, June 25, 1967 (MLKEC, INP).
Press conference on riots, Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, July 24, 1967 (MLKJP, GAMK).
Keynote address, National Conference for New Politics.
The Trumpet of Conscience (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1967), p. 37.
Sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, November 5, 1967 (MLKEC, INP).
“What Are Your New Year’s Resolutions?” sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, January 7, 1968 (MLKEC, INP).
“A Testament of Hope,” Playboy 16 (January 1969): 175.
31. THE POOR PEOPLE’S CAMPAIGN
PRINCIPAL SOURCES:
Statement on Washington Campaign, Atlanta, December 4, 1967 (MLKJP, GAMK).
“Showdown for Non-Violence,” Look 32 (April 16, 1968): 23–25.
“Movement to Washington.”
Address in Memphis, Tennessee, March 18, 1968 (MVC, TMM and MLKJP, JMK).
OTHER SOURCES:
Address at SCLC staff retreat at Penn Center, May 22, 1967.
“What Are Your New Year’s Resolutions?”
Address at mass meeting, Waycross, Georgia, March 22, 1968 (MLKJP, GAMK).
“A Testament of Hope,” Playboy.
32. UNFULFILLED DREAMS
PRINCIPAL SOURCES:
“Unfulfilled Dreams,” sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, March 3, 1968, in Knock at Midnight, pp. 191–200.
“I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.”
“The Drum Major Instinct,” sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, February 4, 1968, in Knock at Midnight, pp. 184–186.
INDEX
Abernathy, Juanita
Abernathy, Rev. Ralph
and Albany Movement
and Birmingham campaign
home bombed
Abraham (Hebrew patriarch)
Acton, Lord
AFL-CIO, National Council of
Africa
liberation struggle in
Alabama
Dallas County
Pupil Placement Law
segregation in
Supreme Court
See also Birmingham; Montgomery;
Selma
Alabama Christian Movement for Human
Rights (ACHR)
Alabama Council on Human Relations
Albany (Ga.) Movement
Alexander, T. M.
America
conscience of
independence for
indictment on
racism in
soul of
two-party system in
See also United States
Amos (prophet)
Anderson, Dr. William G.
Aquinas, Saint Thomas
Aristophanes
Aristotle
Arkansas
Asia
Atlanta Constitution
Atlanta (Ga.) lunch counter sit-ins
Atlanta World
Attucks, Crispus
Augustine, Saint
Baker (safety director)
Barnett, Ross
Beckwith, Byron de la
Beecher, Henry Ward
Belafonte, Harry
Bell, Dr. Roy C.
Bellamy, Edward
Bennett, Rev. L. Roy
Bentham, Jeremy
Bethune, Mary
Bevel, Rev. James
Bhave, Vinoba
Bhoodanists
Billingsley, Orzell
Bill of Rights
Billups, Rev. Charles
Birmingham (Ala.)
business community of
campaign
“Children’s Crusade” in
“D” Day in
desegregation in
Federal troops in
nonviolent power in
segregation in
violence in
See also Letter from Birmingham Jail
Birmingham News
Black, Hugo
Black Muslims
Black Nationalism
Black Power
Bond, Horace Mann
Bond, Julian
Boston Globe
Boston Tea Party
Boutwell, Albert
Bowles, Chester
Boyle, Sarah Patton
Braden, Ann
Brightman, Dr. Edgar S.
Britain (British Empire)
Brown, Ted
Bryant, Farris
Bryant, William Cullen
Buber, Martin
Bunche, Ralph
Bunyan, John
Bus boycott, Montgomery
Byrd, Senator
California
See also Watts riots
Cambodia
Capitalism
decline of
vs. Marxism
Caribbean
Carlyle, Thomas
Carmichael, Stokely
Carpenter, Bishop C. C. J.
Carter, Eugene
Carver, George Washington
Caste system, in India
Castro, Fidel
Chalmers, Dr. Allen Knight
Chaney, James
Chicago
agencies in
campaign
Coordinating Council of Community
Organizations (CCCO)
Freedom Movement
landlords in
open housing in
poverty in
riots in
slums in
teenage boys in
“Children of Vietnam, The” (article)
Christ. See Jesus Christ
Christianity
tragedy of
Christianity and the Social Crisis
(Rauschenbusch)
Christians, early
Civil rights and ideological division
and legislative inertia
progress in
struggle over
Civil Rights Act of 1957
Civil Rights Act of 1960
Civil Rights Act of 1964
Civil War
Clark, Sheriff Jim
Clayton, Charles M.
Clement, Rufus E.
Coffin, William Sloan
Collins, Addie Mae
Collins, Leroy
Communism
totalitarianism of
Communist Manifesto, The (Marx)
Communists
Confessions (St. Augustine)
Congo
Congress
See also House of Representatives
Connor, Eugene (Bull)
Constitution (U.S.)
Preamble to
CORE
Cotton, Dorothy
Crenshaw, Jack
Crusade for Citizenship
Crusader Without Violence (Reddick)
Cuba
Curry, Mrs. Izola Ware
Dabbs, James McBride
Daley, Richard
David, King
Davis, Jefferson
Davis, Sammy
Deacons for Defense
Declaration of Independence
Delaney, Hubert
Democracy, vs. segregation
Democratic Party
Denial, pattern of
Desegregation
struggle over
DeWolf, Dr. L. Harold
Dickenson, Ed
Diggs, Charles
Discrimination. See Segregation
Dixiecrats
Doar, John
Dolan, Joseph F.
Douglas, Helen Gahagan
Drew, Dr. Charles
Durden, A. N.
Durick, Bishop Joseph A.
Eastland, James O.
Egypt
Eisenhower, Dwight D.
Eliot, T. S.
Elkins, Henry
Ellender, Senator
Emancipation Proclamation
Ends, and means
Equality, and inequality
Euripides
Europe
Evers, Medgar
Evil
vs. good
and love
Face the Nation (TV)
Fanon, Frantz
Faubus, Orval
Fauntroy, Walter
FBI
Fifteenth Amendment
First Amendment
Florida
See also St. Augustine struggle
Fourteenth Amendment
France
Freedom
and Black Power
vs. slavery
struggle for
Freedom March, through Mississippi
Freedom Riders
Freedom songs
French, Rev. E. N.
Freud, Sigmund
Gandhi, Mahatma
Gandhians
Garvey, Marcus
Gay, Rev. Ben
Gayle, Mayor
Genealogy of Morals, The (Nietzsche)
Georgia
See also Albany Movement; Atlanta lunch
counter sit-ins
Germany
Ghana
God
as cellmate
faith in
guidance of
light of
power of
seeing
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von
Goldberg, Arthur
Gold Coast
Golden, Harry
Goldwater, Barry
Good, vs. evil
Goodman, Andrew
Gorden, Earl
Grafman, Rabbi Hilton L.
Gray, Fred
Great Depression
Great Society
Greece (ancient)
Green, Bishop Sherman L.
Greensboro, N. C., sit-in
Guatemala
Hall, Peter
Hamer, Fannie Lou
Hardin, Bishop Paul
Harding, Vincent
Harmon, Bishop Holan B.
Hate, as burden
“Hate That Hate Produced, The” (TV)
Hayling, Dr. Robert
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm
Henry, Aaron
Hinduism
Hitler, Adolf
Hobbes, Thomas
Hollowell, Donald L.
House of Representatives
Housing. See Open housing
Humphrey, Hubert H.
Hungary
“I Have a Dream” speech (King)
India
caste system in
nonviolent resistance in
Inequality, and equality
Injustice
atoning for
racial and economic
as threat to justice
Integration
approaches to
in Little Rock
without power
Interstate Commerce Commission
Invitational periods, and volunteers
Irish
Italians
“I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech
(King)
Jackson, Eddie
Jackson, Jimmy Lee
Jackson, Mahalia
Jefferson, Thomas
Jemison, Rev. Theodore
Jeremiah (martyr)
Jesus Christ
crucifixion of
inspiration of
love ethic of
parables of
Jews
John Birch Society
Johns, Dr. Vernon
Johnson, Frank M.
Johnson, Lyndon B.
and civil rights
on equality
and Great Society
on human rights
leadership of
opportunity of
and Vietnam War
and voting rights
and war on poverty
Johnson, Mordecai
Jones, Clarence B. (Chuck)
Judaism
Justice
and love
threatened by injustice
Kapital, Das (Marx)
Katzenbach, Nicholas
Kelsey, Dr. George
Kennedy, John F.
assassination of
and civil rights
epitaph of
moral courage of
vs. Nixon
personality of
as statesman
telegrams to
transformation of
Kennedy, Robert
Kent, Duchess of
King, Rev. A. D. (brother)
King, Alberta Williams (mother)
letter to
King, Bernice Albertine (daughter)
King C. B.
King, Coretta Scott (wife)
advice of
background of
calmness of during crisis
grandmother of
letters to
supportiveness of
telegram to
See also Scott, Coretta
King, Dexter Scott (son)
King, (Michael) Martin Luther, Jr.
and Albany Movement
arrested
assassinated
and Atlanta sit-ins
attempt on life of
on Birmingham, desegregation in
on Birmingham, violence in
birth of
bombing of home
at Boston University
on Chicago
church as second home for
course papers of
at Crozer Theological Seminary
and Day of Penance
at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church
on death
early years of
elected head of MIA
final address in Memphis
on freedom
“I Have a Dream” speech
instructions from
“I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech
jail diary of
on Kennedy assassination
Kennedy meets with
lecture at University of Oslo
and Letter from Birmingham Jail
letters of
on Malcolm X
March on Washington address
marries Coretta Scott
to Memphis strikers
message from jail
on Mississippi
on Mississippi Freedom Democratic
Party
and Montgomery bus boycott
at Morehouse College
Nobel Peace Prize for
on oppressors
parents of
at Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom
and preaching ministry
and Poor People’s Campaign
quoted in newspapers
reminiscence of
on segregation
and Selma voting rights
sentenced
sermons of
in solitary confinement
speeches and statements of
stabbed
as teenager
telegrams from
on temporary segregation
travels of
unfullfilled dreams of
on Vietnam War
and Watts riots
King, (Michael) Martin Luther, Sr. (father)
letter to
suffering of
King, Martin Luther III (son)
King, Slater
King, Tom
King, Yolanda Denise (Yoki) (daughter)
Ku Klux Klan (KKK)
Kunstler, William
Lafayette, Bernard
Lamumba, Patrice
Latin America
Lawndale, poverty in
Laws, just and unjust
Lawson, Rev. James
Lazarus (beggar-hero)
Leadership, and consensus
Lee, Bernard
Lee, Rev. George
Lee, Herbert
Lenin, Nikolai
Letter from Birmingham Jail (King)
Lewis, Rufus
Liberalism, failures of
Life, three dimensions of
Lincoln, Abraham
Little Rock, Ark., high school integration in
Liuzzo, Viola Gregg
Locke, John
Loeb, Mayor Henry
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
Looking Backward (Bellamy)
Los Angeles. See Watts riots
Louisiana
Love
and evil
and Jesus Christ
and justice
and power
Lowell, James Russell
Lowery, Joe
Lunch counter sit-ins
Atlanta (Ga.)
Greensboro (N.C.)
Montgomery (Ala.)
Luther, Martin
Lutuli, Chief Albert
McCall, Walter
McGill, Ralph
McKissick, Floyd
McNair, Denise
letter to family of
Malcolm X
Mandela, Nelson
Manhood, and Black Power
Mao
March on Washington
and “I have a dream” speech
Marshall, Burke
Marshall, Thurgood
Marx, Karl
Marxism
vs. capitalism
Matzeliger, Jan
Maynard, Dr. Aubrey
Mays, Dr. Benjamin E.
Mazo, Earl
Means, and ends
Meet the Press (TV)
Memphis
King’s final address in
march
movement in
Meredith, James
Mexico
MIA (Montgomery Improvement
Association)
Middleton, Rev. Allen
Mill, John Stuart
Miller, Rev.
Ming, William
Mississippi
civil rights workers in
delegation in House
Freedom Democratic Party
Freedom March through
murders in
New Negroes in
Mitchell, Oscar
Montgomery (Ala.)
anarchy in
bus boycott
lunch counter sit-ins
racism in
from Selma march
terror in
See also MIA
Montgomery Advertiser
Moore, Mr. and Mrs. Harry T.
Moore, William
Moral Man and Immoral Society (Niebuhr)
Morgan, Juliette
Moses, Bob
Moslems, in India
Motley, Connie
Mountbatten, Lady
Mozambique
Muelder, Walter
Muhammad, Elijah
Murray, Rev. George M.
Muste, Dr. A. J.
NAACP (National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People)
Legal Defense and Educational Fund
Narayan, Jayaprakash
Nation, The
Nebuchadnezzar
Negro
in American history
anti-Semitism
community, opposing forces in
faith in
“haves” and “have-nots”
insulting of
music of
new, in South
in North
“old” vs. “new”
religion, emotionalism of
revolution
stereotype of
suffering of
“Negro and the Constitution, The” (King)
Nehru, Jawaharlal
New York Post
New York Times
Niebuhr, Reinhold
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
Nigeria
Nixon, E. D.
Nixon, Richard
Nkrumah, Kwame
Nobel, Count Alfred
Nonviolence
crisis for
pride and power of
questioning of
vs. violence
Nonviolent resistance
and Gandhi
and Montgomery bus boycott
pilgrimage to
steps in
Northern Europe
Norway
king of
Olson, Rev. Clark
“On Civil Disobedience” (Thoreau)
Open housing, in Chicago
Operation Breadbasket
Oppression, violence against
Ovid
Pacifism, positions on
Pakistan
Parks, Rosa
Paul, Apostle
Peace Corps
Personalism, importance of
Peru
Phenomenology of Mind (Hegel)
Philosophy of History (Hegel)
Philosophy of Religion, A (Brightman)
Philosophy of Right (Hegel)
Plato
Platonic philosophy
Plessy v. Ferguson
Poor People’s Campaign
Poverty
in Chicago
war on
Powell, Adam
Powell, Mary
Power, and love
Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom
President’s National Advisory Commission
on Civil Disorders
Pritchett, Laurie
Project C.
Public schools, segregation in
Quakers
Raby, Al
Racism
early experiences with
and future
and new Negro in South
and segregation
Rainey, Sheriff
Ramage, Rev. Edward V.
Randolph, A. Philip
Rauschenbusch, Walter
Ray, Rev. Sandy F.
Reason, and liberalism
Red China
Reddick, Dr. Lawrence D.
Reeb, Rev. James
Renaissance
Republican Party
Reuther, Walter
Rich, Marvin
Ricks, Willie
Rillieux, Norbert
Robertson, Carole
Robinson, Jo Ann
Roman Empire
Roosevelt, Franklin D.
Rousseau, Jean Jacques
Royster, Gloria
Russell, Richard
Rustin, Bayard
Satyagraha
Scandinavia
Schwerner, Michael
SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership
Conference)
and Albany Movement
and Birmingham campaign
and Chicago campaign
and Crusade for Citizenship
and Freedom March through Mississippi
and Mississippi challenge
in North
and Operation Breadbasket
and poor people
in Selma
in South
and St. Augustine (Fla.) struggle
See also Southern Leaders Conference
Scott, Bernice
Scott, C. A.
Scott, Coretta (Corrie)
letters to
marries Martin Luther King, Jr.
strength of
understanding of
See also King, Coretta Scott
Scott, Mrs. Fannie E. (Coretta’s
grandmother), letter to
Scott, Obie (Coretta’s father)
Segregation
attack on
basic purpose of
on buses
breaking down wall of
brutality of
on deathbed
vs. democracy
early experiences with
and “I-it” relationship
impatience with
and inequality
lunch counter
moral judgment not given on
in public schools
and racism
scarring effect of
and selfhood
temporary
Selfhood, and segregation
Sellers, Cleveland
Sellers, Police Commissioner
Selma (Ala.)
march in
to Montgomery march
voting rights in
Sermon on the Mount
Sherman, Gen. William
Shores, Arthur
Shuttlesworth, Rev. Fred
Simpson, Bryan
Sit-ins. See Lunch counter sit-ins
Slavery, vs. freedom
Slums, in Chicago
Smiley, Glenn
Smith, Lillian
SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee)
Sobukw窠Robert
Social and Political Action Committee
Socrates
Songs. See Freedom songs; “We shall
overcome”
South Africa
South America
South Carolina
Southeast Asia
Southern Leaders Conference
See also SCLC
Soviet Union
Spivak, Lawrence
Spock, Dr. Benjamin
Stallings, Rev. Earl
Stanton, Secretary Edwin
St. Augustine (Fla.) struggle
Steele, C. K.
Still, Larry
Stride Toward Freedom (King)
Student demonstrations
See also Lunch counter sit-ins
Supreme Court
and Plessy v. Ferguson
on segregation on buses
on segregation in public schools
Sweden
Tension, in nonviolent resistance
Thailand
Thirteenth Amendment
Thomas, Judge
Thomas, Mrs. Lillie
Thomas, Rex
Thoreau, Henry David
Thurmond, Strom
Tillich, Paul
Time, creative use of
Time magazine
Tolstoy, Leo
Truman, Harry
Turner, Nat
Tuttle, Elbert P.
United Nations (U.N.)
United States
destiny of
future of
vs. India, in integrating minorities
See also America
Untouchables, in India
Values
rediscovering lost
true revolution of
Vandiver, S. Ernest
Venezuela
Vesey, Denmark
Vietnam War
Violence
backlash of
and black nationalist groups
as burden
children as victims of
vs. nonviolence
against oppression
precipitation of, through peaceful
actions
as result of unbearable frustration
Vivian, C. T.
Voting rights
in Selma (Ala.)
Voting Rights Act of 1965
Walden, A. T.
Walker, Anne
Walker, Solomon
Walker, Rev. Wyatt Tee
wife of
Wallace, George
Warren, Earl
Watts riots
“We Shall Overcome”
Wesley, Cynthia
West, Mrs. A. W.
Where Do We Go from Here, Chaos or
Community? (King)
White, Lee
White churches
disappointment in leadership of
participation of, in March on
Washington
White Citizens Councils
White moderates, disappointment at lack of
understanding of
Why We Can’t Wait (King)
Wieman, Henry Nelson
Wilkins, Roy
Williams, A. D.
Williams, Alberta
See also King, Alberta Williams
Williams, Dr. Daniel Hale
Williams, Hosea
Williams, Jennie Celeste
Williams, Robert (Bob)
Will to Power, The (Nietzsche)
Wilson, Woodrow
Wofford, Harris
Woods, Granville T.
Wretched of the Earth, The (Fanon)
Wright, Richard
Yates
Yorty, Sam
Young, Andy
wife of
Young, Whitney
Zeitgeist
Zoroastrianism
